The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we now continue our studies of karma, it is necessary for us in the first place to perceive how karma enters into man's development. We must perceive, that is to say, how destiny, interwoven as it is with the free deeds of man, is really shaped and moulded in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to say a few things concerning the human being as he lives on earth. During these lectures we have been studying earthly man in relation to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the organisation of the Ego. But there is yet another way of perceiving his several members, namely when we direct our gaze upon him, simply as he stands before us in the physical world.

In today's lecture—independently of what we have already been discussing—we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth—simply according to his physical form—we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life—as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on—are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away—organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form—namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact,—but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way—beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true—the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste—are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement—and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being—the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice—even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings—such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism—and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing—that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs—and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea—all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward—as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so—that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness—that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

Once more, therefore: when we conceive man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, Feeling to the rhythmic organisation, Willing to the motor-organisation. Wide awake consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which our feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and what we have as memory. As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour. The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech—pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus—

Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain—the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time—namely now, when you remember it—you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there—beneath the ideation—certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation—the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram)—where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas—it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man. Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life—you breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere. And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region—the region out of which memory arises—you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation. This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the earth. What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our Feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy—spiritual Beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—they are the Beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human Ego actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises: What are they doing—these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us—what are they doing?

The answer is: the Third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc.—concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking—with that which is going on in our head—we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.

Now let us go on to the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai, etc. They are the Beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual Beings of this Second Hierarchy—the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth—we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual Beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us—so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness—we work it out with these Beings, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down—as it were, looking through the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.

As earthly man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on earth. While we ourselves are engaged in this work—working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth—the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity—a portion, a small portion of their activity—they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on earth. They are obliged to reproduce it—though in a peculiar way.

Think of a man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The Beings of the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.

You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the Beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on earth.

Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds—whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district—or a vocation—which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods—Gods of the First Hierarchy—in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods—namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth—men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.¹

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

• 1. From The Cherubinic Wanderer. Book I. 8.

Mountainous country; in the distance, Hilary's house, in the vicinity of the workshops, which are not seen. Hilary's house has no upper floor; no corners or angles, and is crescent shaped. A waterfall on the left of the stage, facing audience. A rivulet runs from the waterfall between little rocks across the stage.

Johannes is seen sitting on a rock to right, ignorant of the presence of Capesius, on the left of stage.

Johannes:
The towering masses with their silent life
Brim up the air with riddles manifold,
Yet ask no maddening questions such as slay
A soul that seeks not for experience
But only for serenity in which
It may behold life's revelation clear.
See how these colours play among these cliffs,
How calmly dumb the bare expanses lie,
How twilight clothes the woods in green and blue;
This is the world in which Johannes' soul
Will rest and weave to-morrow's fantasies.

Johannes' soul shall feel within itself
The depths and distances of this its world;
And by creative powers this soul shall be
Delivered of its hidden energy
And make known that the world's enchantment is
Only appearance glorified by art.
Yet could Johannes ne'er accomplish this
Did not Maria through her love awake
With gentle soul-warmth forces in his soul.
I must acknowledge fate's wise leadership
In drawing me so closely unto her.
How short a time it is since I have known
That she is by my side; how closely knit
Hath been in these few weeks Johannes' soul
Into a living unity with hers.
As spirit she lives in me though far off;
She thinks within my thought when I call up
Before my soul the objects of my will.

(Maria appears as a thought of Johannes.)

Maria here before me! but how strange!
She must not thus reveal herself to me!
This stern cold spirit-face, this dignity
That chills my earthly feelings—
'tis not thus Johannes will or can Maria see
Draw nigh to him. 'Tis not Maria—this—
Whom by kind fate's decree wise powers have sent.

(Maria disappears from Johannes' vision.)

Where is Maria whom Johannes loved
Before she had transformed his soul in him
And led it up to ice-cold spirit-heights?

And where Johannes, whom Maria loved,
Where is he now?—He was at hand e'en now.
I see no more Johannes, who did give
Me back unto myself with joy. The past
Cannot and shall not rob me of him thus.

(Maria again appears before Johannes' vision.)

Maria:
Maria as thou fain wouldst her behold
Lives not in worlds where shines the light of truth.
Johannes' spirit treads illusion's realm
By fantasy misled; set thyself free
From strong desire and its alluring power.
I feel in me the turmoil of thy soul;
It robs me of the calmness that I need.
'Tis not Johannes who directs the storm
Into my soul; it is another being,
O'er whom he was victorious in the past.
Now as a wraith it roams the spirit-plains;—
Once known for such, it straight will fade away.

Johannes:
That is Maria as she really is,
Who of Johannes speaks as he appears
To his own vision at the present time.
Long since into another form he rose
Than that which errant fancy paints for me
Because I am content to let my soul
Amuse itself with dreams in slothful ease.
But not yet doth this being hold me fast.
Escape from him I still can—and I will—
He often calls me to his side and strives
To win me for myself by his own powers—
Vet will I strive to free myself from him.
Long years ago he flooded my soul's depth
With spirit being; none the less to-day
No more do I desire to harbour him.

Thou stranger being in Johannes' soul
Forsake me—give me back my pristine self
Before thou didst commence thy work in me.
I would behold Johannes free of thee.

(Benedictus appears at Maria's side, equally as a thought of Johannes.)

Benedictus:
Johannes, heed the warning of thy soul;
The man who, flooding thee with spirit, rose
To be thy nature's primal energy,
Must at thy side still hold his faithful sway
And claim that thou transform his being's powers
Through thy will into human deeds. He must
Himself concealed, work out his task in thee,
That thou some day mayst reach what thou dost know
To be thy being's distant future goal.
Thy personal sorrow thou must bear through life
Fast locked within the chamber of thy soul.
So only shalt thou win thyself, if thou
Dost bravely let him own thee more and more.

Maria (seen as a thought of Johannes):
My holy earnest vow doth pour out strength,
Which shall preserve for thee what thou hast won.
Me shalt thou find in those cold fields of ice,
Where spirits must create light for themselves,
When darkness wounds and maims the powers of life.
Seek me within those cosmic depths where souls
Wrestle to win God-knowledge for themselves
By conquest that wins being from the void;
But never seek me in the realm of shades,
Where outlived soul-experience wins by guile
A transient life from out illusion's web,
And dream's frail phantoms can the spirit cheat;
So that in pleasure it forgets itself
And looks on serious effort with distaste.

(Benedictus and Maria disappear.)

Johannes:
She saith illusion ...
... yet 'tis passing fair.
It lives; Johannes feels in it himself,
He feels Maria's nearness in him too.
Johannes would not know how spirit works
To solve the riddles of the soul's dark depths.
He would create and would as artist work.
So may that part of him still lie concealed,
Which consciously would gaze on cosmic heights,

(He sinks into further meditation.)

(Capesius rises from his seat; as it were arousing himself out of deep thought.)

Capesius:
Did I not clearly feel within my soul
That which Johannes, dreaming over there,
Wrought as the pictures of his longing heart?
Within me glowed to life thoughts not mine own—
Such as he only could originate.
The being of his soul lived in mine own,
I saw him younger grown, as he beheld
Himself through vain illusion, and did mock
The ripe fruits that his spirit had achieved.

But hold! Why do I now experience this?
For seldom may the spirit-searcher see
The being in himself of other souls.

I mind, that Benedictus often said
That only he—and only for a while—
Can do this, whose good destiny ordains
That he shall be upraised one further step
Upon the spirit path. May I thus read
The meaning of what happened even now?
Seldom indeed could this thing be allowed;
For 'twould be terrible if aye the seer
Could see the inner being of men's souls.

Did I see truly?—or could it have been
Illusion let me dream another's soul?
I must enquire from Johannes' self.

(Capesius approaches Johannes, who now notices him for the first time.)

Johannes:
Capesius—I thought thee far from here.

Capesius:
Yet my soul felt. itself quite near to thine.

Johannes:
Near mine—at such a time—it cannot be!

Capesius:
Why dost thou shudder at these words of mine?

Johannes:
I do not shudder ...

(At this moment Maria joins them; this enables both Johannes and Capesius to speak their next words to themselves.)

(To himself):
... how his steady glance
Doth pierce me to mine inmost depth of soul.

Capesius (to himself):
His shudder shows me that I saw aright.

(turning to Maria.)

Maria, thou dost come in fitting time.
Perhaps thy tongue may speak some word of cheer
To solve the problem which oppresseth me.

Maria:
I thought to find Johannes here, not thee.
Forboding bade me seek the problem's weight
In him—but thou, I fancied, wast content,
Devoted to that glorious enterprise
Which we are offered here by Hilary.

Capesius:
What care I for it? It disturbs me now—

Maria:
Disturbs thee? Didst thou not express delight
To think thy projects might be realized?

Capesius:
What I have lived through in this fateful hour
Hath changed the former purpose of my soul,
Since all activity in work on earth
Must rob me of my new clairvoyant powers.

Maria:
Whoe'er is suffered to tread spirit-ways
Finds many a hint to shape his destiny.
On soul paths he will try to follow them,
Yet they have not been rightly understood
If they disturb his duties on the earth.

(Capesius sits, and is plunged in thought while the vision of Lucifer appears to Maria.)

Lucifer:
Thine effort will not bring thee much reward,
New force begins to stir within his heart
That opes the portal of his soul to me.
Maria, gaze with thy clairvoyant sight
Upon his inmost soul; and there behold
How he doth free himself on spirit-wings
From thy warm loving bonds of work on earth.

(Lucifer remains on the scene.)

(Maria turns towards Capesius to rouse him from his meditation, but at the same moment he seems to rouse himself of his own accord.)

Maria:
If on the spirit-path Johannes felt
The nature of his duties hinder him,
'Twould not be right, but 'twould be natural.
For he must work upon the outer plane.
Thy task is to expound the spirit-lore
To other men and such a task as this
Cannot impede the progress of thy soul.

Capesius:
Far more than when they work on outer things
Do spirit forces lose themselves in words.
Words make one reason o'er what one has seen,
And reason is a foe to seership's power.
I had a spirit-vision even now
Which only could disclose itself to me
Because the soul which was revealed to me,—
Although our earthly bodies are close friends,—
Had never been by me quite understood.
If I saw truly, I am no more bound
By any ties unto this work of earth.
For I must feel persuaded that high Powers
Now set another goal before my soul
Than that prescribed for it by Hilary.

(He places himself in front of Johannes.)

Johannes, tell me truly, didst thou not
A while ago feel old, outlived desires
That lived within thee like thy present self,
While thou wast lost in meditation deep?

Johannes:
Can then my spirit's struggle work to form
Experience within another's soul?
And can such vision make mine error strong
To find its way to life in cosmic space?

(Johannes again falls into meditation.)

(Maria turns her face towards Lucifer and hears him say:)

Lucifer:
Here too I find the soul's gate open wide.
I'll not delay but use this chance at once.
If also in this soul a spirit-wish
Is born, that work of love must come to naught
Which doth bode ill to me through Hilary.
I can destroy Maria's might in him:
And thus can add her power unto mine own.

(Capesius at this moment straightens up self-consciously, and, during the following speech, shows an increasingly definite conviction.)

Capesius:
My doubts dissolve: that which I saw was true;
I was allowed to see Johannes' life.
So is it also clear that his world could
Only unfold itself because mine own
Ne'er sought to draw near his with Reason's power.
The spirit-path hath need of solitude,
Co-operation is but meant for those
Who reasoning, can each other understand.
For from such intercourse the soul attains
The wide dominions of the worlds of light.
Example in old Felix can I find;
He seeks on paths that none but he may know
In proud seclusion for the spirit-light.
He sought and found because he kept himself
From ever grasping things by reason's strength.
In his track will I follow, and thy work,
Which hampers seership's power with earthly things,
Shall no more lead Capesius astray.

(Exit.)

Maria:
So 'tis with man, what time his better self
Sinks into spirit-sleep and strong desire
Is all his being's food until again
True spirit-nature wakes in glowing light.
Such is the sleep all human beings sleep
Before clairvoyant powers have wakened them.
They know not they are sleeping, though awake
They seem awake, because they ever sleep.
And seers do sleep, when they would fain awake
By hast'ning forth from their true spheres of life.
Capesius will now withdraw from us.
It is no transient whim; his mental life
Draws him away from us and from our plans.
It is not he that turns himself from us;
The dread decree of fate is plainly seen.
And so we who are left must consecrate
Our powers with more devotion to our work.

Johannes:
Maria, do not of Johannes ask
That for new aims at such a time as this
He should gird up his soul, who like that other,
Needs spirit-sleep in which he may mature
The forces which are germinating there.
I know that I in time to come shall dare
To work for spirit-worlds—but do not now
Appeal to me for services—not now.
Think how I drove away Capesius ...
Were I ripe for this work—he would be, too.

Maria:
Capesius away? Dost thou not—dream?

Johannes:
I dreamed while conscious, ... yea, I woke in dreams.
What would seem fantasy to cosmic powers
To me proved symbol of my present state.
Right well I know my wish was my true self;
My thinking only was another self.
And so Johannes stood before my soul
As once he was, ere spirit seized on him
And filled his being with a second self.
He is not dead; ... Johannes' living wish
Createth him companion of my soul.
I may have stunned him, but not overthrown.
A living man, he claims his natural rights
Whene'er that other self must sink to sleep.
And always to awake—exceeds its powers.
It was asleep throughout the time in which
Capesius could experience in himself
How my first nature tore me from myself.
My dreams did seem to him the sign of fate
And so in me and not in him doth work
The power which drove him forth, and which forbids
Our spirit to be turned to work on earth.

Maria:
The spirit-powers are coming—call on them.
To cosmic spirit-sources turn thy gaze
And wait until the powers within those depths
Discover that within thine own true self
Which stirs with conscious life akin to theirs.
Their magic words will show thine inward sight
That which makes them and thee an unity.
Cast out thine own brain's interfering speech,
That spirit may speak in thee as it wills;
And to this spirit-speech give thou due heed.
'Twill carry thee beyond the spheres of light
And link thee to true spirit-essence there.
Thy misty visions sprung from times long past
Will then grow sharp and clear in cosmic light,
But will not bind thee since thou hast control.
Compare them with these elemental forms,
With shadows and with phantoms of all kinds,
And place them near to demons manifold
And so discover what they really are.
But in the realm of spirits root thyself,
Who primal source to primal source do bind,
Who dwell close linked with dormant cosmic powers
And order the processions of the spheres.
This view of cosmic things will give thee strength,
Amid the surging sea of spirit-life,
To blend thyself and inmost soul in one.

The spirit bids me tell thee this myself;
But now give ear to what thou knowest well
Though 'tis not wedded yet to thy soul-depths.

Johannes (still sitting on a rock to right of stage. He collects himself for a determined effort):
I will give ear—I will defy myself.

(From both sides advance elemental spirits. From the right of stage creatures like gnomes. They have steel-blue-grey bodies, small as compared with men; they are nearly all head, but it is bent forward and downward, and is lilac and purple in color, with tendrils and gills of various shades of the same hue. Their limbs are long and mobile, suitable for gesticulation, but ill-adapted for walking. From the left of stage come sylph-like figures, slender and almost headless; their feet and hands are partly fins and partly wings. Some of them are bluish-green, others yellowish-red. The yellowish-red ones are distinguished by sharper outlines than the bluish green ones. The words spoken by these figures are accompanied by expressive gestures developing into a dance.)

Chorus of the Gnomes (dancing, hopping, and gesticulating in rhythm):
We harden, we strengthen (said sharply and quickly)
The nebulous earth-dust;
We loosen, we powder
Hard-crusted earth-boulders;
Swift shatter we the hard,
Slow harden we the loose.
Such is our spirit-kind.
Of mental matter formed
Full-skilled were we before
When human souls still slept (said slowly and dreamily)
And dreamed when earth began.

Chorus of the Sylphs (a swaying motion in rhythm):
We weave and we unweave
The web of watery air;
We scatter and divide
Seed forces from the sun;
Light-force condense with care;
Fruit-powers destroy with skill;
For such is our soul-kind
From rays of feeling poured,
Which ever-living glows
That mankind may enjoy
Earth-evolution's sense.

Chorus of the Gnomes (dancing, hopping, and gesticulating in rhythm):
We titter and we laugh (said sharply and quickly)
We banter and grimace,
When stumbling human sense
And fumbling human mind
Beholds what we have made;
They think they understand
When spirits from our age
Weave charms for their dull eyes (said slowly and emphatically).

Chorus of the Sylphs (a swaying motion in rhythm):
We take care, and we tend,
Bear fruit and in spirit,
When young mankind's dawn-life
And old mankind's errors
Consume what we have made
And childlike or greyhaired
Find in time's stream dull joy
From our eternal plans.

(These spirit-beings collect in two irregular groups in the background, and remain there visible. From the right appear the three soul forces: Philia, Astrid, and Luna with ‘the Other Philia.’)

Philia:
They ray out the light
As loving light-forms
To ripeness so blest,
So gently they warm
And mightily heat
Where embryo growth
Would reach actual life;
That this actual life,
May make souls rejoice
Who lovingly yield
To radiant light.

Astrid:
'Tis life that they weave,
And help to create,
In beings at birth;
They shatter the earth
And densify air;
That change may appear
In strenuous growth.
Such strenuous growth
Fills spirits with joy
Who feel that they weave
A life which creates.

Luna:
They thoughtfully mould,
Alert to create
In flexible stuff;
They sharpen the edge
And flatten the face,
And cunningly build
The clearly-cut forms;
That clearly-cut forms
The will may inspire
With cunning to build,
Alert to create.

The Other Philia:
They gather the blooms
And use without care
The magical works;
They dream of the true,
And the seeming protect;
That germs which lie hid
May wake into life.
And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.

(These four soul forces disappear towards the left; Johannes, who during the preceding events was deep in meditation, rouses himself.)

Johannes:
‘And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.’
These are the words that still distinctly ring
Within my soul; that which I saw before
Passed in confusion out of my soul's ken.

Yet what a power stirs in me, when I think;
‘The magical web
That forms their own life.’

(He relapses once more into meditation; there appears to him as a thought form of his own a group composed of: The Spirit of Johannes' youth, with Lucifer on its right and Theodora's soul on its left.)

The Spirit of Johannes' youth:
The life within thy wishes feeds my life,
My breath drinks thirstily thy youthful dreams;
I am alive when thou dost not desire
To force thy way to worlds I cannot find.
If in thyself thou losest me, I must
Do grievous painful service to grim shades:—
O guardian of my life ... forsake me not.

Lucifer:
He never will forsake thee,—I behold
Deep in his nature longings after light
Which cannot follow in Maria's steps.
And when the radiance which is born of them
Doth fully light Johannes' artist-soul
It must bear fruit; nor will he be content
To cast this fruit away in yonder realm
Where love divorced from beauty reigns alone.
His self will no more seem of worth to him
Which fain would cast his best gifts to the shades,
Because it sets by knowledge too much store.
When wisdom shall throw light on his desires
Their glorious worth will be revealed to him;
He only can think them of little worth
So long as they hide darkly in the soul.
Until they can attain to wisdom's light
I will be thy protector—through the light
I find deep-seated in the human soul.

He has as yet no pity for thy woes,
And ever lets thee sink among the shades
When he is striving up the heights of light.
For then he can forget that thou, his child,
Must lead a miserable phantom life.
But henceforth, thou wilt find me at thy side
When as a shade thou freezest through his fault.
I will exert my rights as Lucifer

(At the word ‘Lucifer’ the Spirit of Johannes' youth starts.)

Reserved to me by ancient cosmic law,
And occupy those depths within his soul
He leaves unguarded in his spirit-flight.
I'll bring thee treasure that will light for thee
The dark seclusion of the shadow-realms.
But thou wilt not be fully freed till he
Can once again unite himself with thee.
This act he can delay ... but not prevent.
For Lucifer will well protect his rights.

Theodora:
Thou spirit-child, thou liv'st Johannes' youth
In gloomy shadow-realms. To thee in love
Bends down the soul which o'er Johannes broods
From realms ablaze with light, aglow with love.
She will from thine enchantment set thee free
If thou wilt take so much of what she feels
As shall procure thee life in blessedness.
I will ally thee with the elements
Which labour unaware in cosmic space
And ne'er descend to wakefulness of soul.
With those earth-spirits thou canst fashion forms,
And with the fire-souls thou canst ray out power,
If thou wilt sacrifice thy conscious life
Unto the Will that works with light and power
But without human wisdom. So shalt thou
Preserve thy knowledge,` only half thine own,
From Lucifer, and to Johannes give
The services which are of worth to him.
From his soul's being I will bring to him
What causeth him to crave thy being's aid,
And find refreshment in the spirit-sleep.

Lucifer:
But beauty she can ne'er bestow on thee
Since I myself dare take it far from her.

Theodora:
From noble feeling I will find the germ
Of beauty which grows ripe through sacrifice.

Lucifer:
From free-will she will tear thee and instead
Give thee to spirits dwelling in the dark.

Theodora:
I shall awaken sight by spirit filled
That e'en from Lucifer free knows itself.

(Lucifer, Theodora, and the Spirit of " Johannes' youth disappear. Johannes, awaking from his meditation, sees ` the Other Philia approaching him,)

The Other Philia:
And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.

Johannes:
Thou riddle-speaking spirit—at thy words
This world I entered! Of its mysteries.
One only-is important for my soul:
Whether, as living in the spirit worlds,
The shadow dwells who sought with Lucifer
And Theodora to be shown to me.

The Other Philia:
He lives—lives as a semblance waked by thee.
E'en as a glass in pictures loth reflect
All things by light upon its surface thrown
So must whate'er in spirit-realms thou see'st—
Ere full maturity gives thee the right
To such clairvoyance—mirrored be in life
Within the realm of half-waked spirit-shades.

Johannes:
'Tis but a picture, mirrored thus by me?

The Other Philia:
Yet one that lives and keeps its hold on life
So long as thou dost keep within thyself
An outlived self which thou indeed canst stun
But which as yet thou canst not overthrow.
Johannes, thine awakening is but false
Until thou shalt thyself set free the shade
Whom thine offence doth grant a life bewitched.

Johannes:
What thanks I owe this spirit, who brings truth
Into my soul.—I needs must follow her.

Curtain falls slowly, while ‘the Other Philia’ and Johannes remain quietly standing
The Soul's Awakening

With the remark that the present, in particular the German philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist.

On the whole, the theories of knowledge which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance, is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings. I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world—after Kant’s view—coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me—the table, the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them.

I cannot state whether still anything exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things; that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual.

I want to show you how a vigorous book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It is a book which—we can say it absolutely that way—could be written by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that, however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed, it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...” and so on.

The human being with his average mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.”

At first I would like to bring forward to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and next time we want to see how one can find the way with it.

First of all physics seems to teach us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but moved air is there.

The same applies to the colours and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether. The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves. This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation “red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: what is there if no feeling eye exists?—It should be nothing else of the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world.

What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves. This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed to use an image of that which takes place without us.—What we know as a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness is not an image but a mere sign.

Physics has maintained that space and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves” are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we cannot know—in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this and that way, and, therefore, something—may it be spatial or not—has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective. You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether. Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within our consciousness and except this nothing exists.

The second that the science of the 19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light and colour sensations.

Physiology still delivers additional building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard. Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness.

We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it.

Let us go over to another sense, to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin, the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus, but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.”

You see that this epistemology limits the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose—if he wants—that anything exists in the world which makes impression on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve, and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created from our inside.

These are the physiological proofs which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless, recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness, is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves, is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience.

When I said: it is beyond the field of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly. There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800). He says in it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me, but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and also not my own. There is no being.—I myself do not know at all, and I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know about themselves in the way of images—images which pass without anything existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images.”
Indeed—if you stick to the view that you deal in your subjective opinion only with the things of your own consciousness, then you must get inevitably to the view that you do not know more about yourselves than about the outside world. If you go over to the image of the own ego, then you do not have more of it than of the outside world. Keep this thought in mind in its full significance, then it becomes clear to you that the outside world dissolves in a sum of hallucinations, and that also the inside world is nothing else than a creation of subjective dreams fitted together. You can imagine already from the outside, I would like to say, from the corporeality that also you yourselves like the outside world are nothing else than dream images or illusions if you interpret the view correctly.

Look at your hand which transforms your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to an image in my consciousness.

The idea of the ego is also an image; it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me—this is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered this as a sum of figments.

These were the proofs of freedom, of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself” that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws of perception and, hence, the matters: God—soul—will—are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is not able to overcome it.

In the preface of the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative which appears with an unconditional obligation in us.—Kant calls it a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can never find with the senses.

A harmony between the sensory world and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom?—Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out of the theoretical reason.

Those views which have no connection apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy. Also a philosopher who had great influence—also in pedagogy: Herbart. He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego. Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing. It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions; we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being, to true reality.—However, he also has this in common with Kant that that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being.

We come now, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never know about the world—he says—anything else than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason cannot teach.—And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions, we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason. Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection.

This is the first phase of the development of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition. It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy. Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism, this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity, from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin, in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy.

In the end, you will see how theosophy emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality.

Our considerations will begin with the so-called Pentecost event. In the first lecture I indicated that our investigation can at least begin with this event. For this event presents itself to clairvoyance as a kind of awakening which the personalities on a certain day, Pentecost, experienced—the personalities normally called the apostles or disciples of Christ Jesus. It is not easy to evoke an exact perception of all those extraordinary events, and we will have to recall – from the depths of our souls, so to speak – much of what we have already gained from our anthroposophical considerations if we want to combine exact perceptions with all which our lecture cycle has to say about this subject.

The apostles felt like awakened individuals who had lived for a long time in an unusual state of consciousness. It was really like a kind of awakening from a deep sleep, from a strange, dream-filled sleep, in which one carries out the everyday tasks of life as reasonable people do, so that others do not notice that one is in a different state of consciousness. Then came the moment when it seemed to the apostles that they had lived through a long time as in a dream from which they awoke with the Pentecost event. And they experienced this awakening in an extraordinary way: they really felt as though something we can only call the substance of all-encompassing love had descended on them from out of the universe. The apostles felt impregnated by all-encompassing love and awakened from the described dream-like state. As though they had been awakened by all that which as the source of the power of love pervades and warms the universe, as though this source of the power of love had penetrated the soul of each one of them. They seemed very strange to the others who heard how they talked. Those others knew that they had previously led very simple lives, but some of them had been acting strangely in the previous days, as though lost in dreams. Now, however, they were as transformed: like people who had achieved a new state of mind or soul disposition, like people who had lost all the narrow restrictions, all the egotism of life, who had gained an infinitely wide heart and all-embracing tolerance, a deeply heartfelt understanding of all that is human on earth. They could also express themselves so that everyone present could understand them. One felt also that they could see into each heart and soul and clarify the secrets of the soul, so they could comfort the other, could tell him exactly what he needed.

It was of course astonishing that such a transformation could happen to a number of people. But those people who experienced the transformation, who had been awakened by the cosmic spirit of love, those people felt in themselves a new understanding for what had acted in common in their souls, but which they had until then not understood. Now, in that instant, understanding of what actually happened on Golgotha appeared before their minds' eye. And if we look into the soul of one of those apostles, the one usually called Peter in the other gospels, clairvoyant observation sees his normal consciousness as having been completely obliterated from the moment the gospels usually call the denial. He looked back to the denial scene, when he was asked if he had a connection to the Galilean, and he knew now that he denied it because his consciousness had begun to fade and an abnormal state to take its place, a kind of dream state, which meant removal into a completely different world. For him it was like a person who upon waking in the morning remembers the last events before going to sleep the night before; that's how Peter remembered what is called the denial, the triple denial before the cock crowed twice. And then the intermediate state of Peter's consciousness unfurled. It wasn't filled with mere dream-images, but with images presented by a kind of higher state of consciousness, which presented an experience of purely spiritual matters. And everything that happened, that Peter had slept through since that time, appeared before his soul as a clairvoyant dream. Above all he learned to see the event, about which one can truly say he slept through, because for a full understanding of that event the fecundation by all-encompassing love was necessary. Now the images of the mystery of Golgotha appeared before his eyes in a way similar to how we can recall them with clairvoyant vision if we establish the necessary conditions.

Frankly, it is with a unique feeling that one decides to put into words what is revealed when looking into the consciousness of Peter and the others who were gathered on that Pentecost day. One can only bring one's self to speak of these things with a holy awe. One could even say that he is almost overcome with awareness that he is treading on the holy ground of human esteem when expressing what is revealed to the soul's vision. However, it seems to him necessary, due to certain spiritual considerations, to speak of these things in our times; with full knowledge that other times will come in which these things will meet with more understanding than is the case now. For in order to understand much of what will be said at this opportunity, the human soul must free itself of quite a few things which are necessary to it during this cultural period.

First of all, something which is offensive to contemporary natural scientific consciousness appears to clairvoyant vision. Nevertheless, I feel myself obliged to express in words as well as I can what appears to the soul's vision. I can't do anything about it if what I must say is communicated to less prepared minds and souls and the whole thing is exaggeratedly described as something which cannot stand up to the scientific concepts which dominate the present time.

The clairvoyant glance first falls on an image that depicts a reality which is also indicated in other gospels, but which presents a very special view when selected from the fullness of views which clairvoyant observation can receive when looking back in time. Clairvoyant observation is drawn to a kind of darkening of the earth. And one feels, as in an imagination, the meaningful moment when for hours the physical sun is darkened over the land of Palestine, over the site of Golgotha, like an eclipse of the sun.

One has the impression that spiritual-scientifically trained observation can now verify if a physical eclipse of the sun really occurred over that land: that for this observation the whole human environment takes on a completely different aspect. I would like to put aside what human technology has to say about a solar eclipse. A strong mind and the conviction that all had to happen as it did are necessary in order to withstand the demonic powers which arise during a solar eclipse. But I prefer not to go into that further, only to bring to your attention the fact that during such a moment what otherwise can only be obtained through difficult meditation appears light-filled. One sees plants and animals differently, every butterfly looks different. It is something which in the deepest sense can bring forth the conviction of how in the cosmos a certain spiritual life – which belongs to the sun and what one sees in the sun also as its physical life – is connected to life on the earth. And how when the physical glow is drastically darkened by the covering moon, it is different from when the sun simply doesn't glow during the night. The appearance of the earth around us is quite different during a solar eclipse than when it is night. One feels the group-souls of the plants and animals arise during a solar eclipse. One feels a dimming of the corporality of plants and animals and a brightening of their group-souls.

This experience is especially strong for clairvoyant observation when directed towards the moment in earthly evolution which we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And then one learns what this notable natural phenomenon means. I really can't help it if I am obliged to read in the occult text about a natural phenomenon as it occurred exactly at that point in the earth's evolution – as it has of course also earlier and later occurred – in contradiction to contemporary materialistic thinking. When one opens a book and reads the text, one has the impression that what one should read comes forth from the letters. Thus also from the cosmic letters comes forth the necessity of reading something which humanity should learn. It appears as a word written in the cosmos, as a cosmic phonetic symbol.

And what does one read when he opens his soul to it? Yesterday I pointed out that during Greek times humanity had developed to the point in which through Plato and Aristotle it rose to a very high level of learning, of intellectuality. In many respects the knowledge achieved by Plato and Aristotle could not be superseded in later times, for the summit of human intellectuality had already been reached. And when we consider that this intellectual knowledge was made extremely popular in the Greek and Italian peninsulas by wandering preachers during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when we consider how this knowledge was spread in a way which we cannot understand, then one has the possibility of an impression of reading the letters of the occult cosmic text. When one has attained to clairvoyant consciousness he can say: everything which humanity had gathered as knowledge in pre-Christian times comes under the sign of the moon, which from the viewpoint of the earth travels through space, and it is the moon because for higher human perception this knowledge had not enlightened, had not solved riddles, but for higher perception was darkening, as the moon darkens the sun during an eclipse. That is what one reads.

So at that time knowledge was not enlightening, but acted as a darkening of the riddle of the world, and one feels as a clairvoyant the darkening of the higher, spiritual regions of the world through the knowledge of ancient times, which acted in respect to higher knowledge as the moon acts during a solar eclipse. And this external event is an expression of man having achieved a stage in which man's self-created knowledge was placed in front of higher knowledge as the moon stands before the sun during an eclipse. In that solar eclipse one feels humanity's darkening of the sun within the earth's evolution written in an awesome sign of the cosmic occult text. I said that contemporary consciousness can consider this offensive because it has no understanding of the spiritual power in the universe. I do not wish to speak of miracles in the usual sense, of the breaking of natural laws, but I can do no other than inform you how one can read that solar eclipse – how one can do no other than position one's soul before that solar eclipse as though reading what that natural event signifies: With moon-knowledge an eclipse of the higher solar message occurred.

And then one's clairvoyant consciousness perceives the raised cross on Golgotha on which the body of Jesus hangs between the two thieves. Then the removal from the cross and the burial appears – and I might add that the more one tries to avoid this image the stronger it appears. Now a second powerful sign appears which must be read in order to understand it as a symbol of what has happened in the evolution of humanity: One follows the image of Jesus taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb, and one is thoroughly shaken by an earthquake which went through the area.

Perhaps the relation between that solar eclipse and the earthquake will someday be better understood scientifically, for certain teachings which are prevalent today but incoherent, indicate a relation between solar eclipses and earthquakes and even firedamps in mines. That earthquake was a consequence of the solar eclipse. That earthquake shook the tomb in which Jesus' body lay – and the stone which had been placed before the tomb was ripped away and a crevice opened in the ground and the body fell onto the crevice. Further vibrations caused the ground to close over the crevice. And when the people came in the morning the tomb was empty, for the earth had received Jesus' body; the stone, however, remained apart from the tomb.

Let us follow the sequence of images! Jesus dies on the cross. Darkness suddenly covers the earth. Jesus' body is laid in the tomb. An earthquake opens the earth's crust and Jesus' body is received by the earth. The crevice caused by the quake closes. The stone is thrown aside. These are all factual events; I can do naught else but describe them as such. May those who wish to approach these things from a natural scientific viewpoint judge as they wish and use every possible argument against them. What clairvoyant observation sees is as I have described it. And if someone wishes to say that such things cannot happen, that a symbol is placed in the cosmos as a powerful sign-language to indicate that something new has occurred in human evolution; when someone wishes to say that the divine powers do not write about what happens on the earth with such sign-language as a solar eclipse and an earthquake, I can only reply: All respect to your belief that it can not be so. But it happened anyway! I can imagine that an Ernest Renan, who wrote the peculiar “Life of Jesus” would come and say: One does not believe such things, for one only believes what can be duplicated by experiment. But that argument is unfeasible, for would a Renan not believe in the ice age although it is impossible to reproduce it by experiment? It is of course impossible to reproduce the ice age, and nevertheless all scientific investigators believe in it. It is also impossible to reproduce that once-occurring cosmic sign. Nevertheless, it happened.

We can only approach these events if we clairvoyantly take the path which I have indicated, if we first examine Peter's or one of the other apostle's souls, who felt themselves fecundated by all-encompassing cosmic love. Only if we look into their souls and see how they experienced things do we find via this detour the ability to observe the raised cross on Golgotha, the darkening of the earth and the earthquake which followed it. That the eclipse and the quake were normal natural events is not denied; but he who follows these events clairvoyantly reads them as I have described, insofar as he has created the necessary conditions in his soul. For in fact what I have described was for Peter's consciousness something which had crystallized from the basis of the long sleep. From the many images which crossed through Peter's consciousness the following were emphasized: The cross raised on Golgotha, the eclipse and the quake. Those were for Peter the first fruits of the fecundation by all-encompassing love at the Pentecost event. And now he knew something which he had not previously known: that the event of Golgotha really took place, and that the body which hung on the cross was the same body with which he had often wandered in life. Now he knew that Jesus died on the cross, that this death was really a birth, the birth of that spirit who as all-encompassing love exuded in the souls of the apostles gathered at Pentecost. Peter sensed it as a ray of the infinite, aeonic love. He sensed it as what was born as Jesus died on the cross. An awesome truth penetrated Peter's soul: a death only seemed to have taken place on the cross.

In reality that death, preceded by infinite suffering, was the birth of what entered his soul like a ray. With the death of Jesus something entered the earth which had previously existed only externally: all-encompassing cosmic love. That's easy to say abstractly. But one must penetrate the Peter-soul for a moment to imagine how it felt: In the instant that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross at Golgotha, something had been born to the earth which previously only existed in the cosmos. The death of Jesus of Nazareth was the birth of cosmic love within the earth's sphere.

That is the first insight which we can gather from what we call the Fifth Gospel. With what is called in the New Testament the arrival, the pouring out of the spirit, begins with what I have now described. The apostles, due to their soul constitution, were not able to accompany the death of Jesus of Nazareth except with an anomalous consciousness.

Peter, also John and James, recollected still another moment in his life, which can only be revealed to us in all its grandeur through the Fifth Gospel. He with whom they wandered led them to the mount and said: Stand guard! And they fell asleep. Their souls were already being gradually overtaken by the sleeping state. Their normal consciousness sank into a sleep which lasted through the event of Golgotha, and out of which beamed what I have been trying to describe in stammering words. And Peter, John and James had to recall how they fell into that state and how now, as they looked back, the great events dawned on them which had to do with the physical body of him with whom they had wandered. And gradually, as dreams emerge in human consciousness, in human souls, the previous days emerged in the apostles' consciousness. What emerged was the whole time which they had experienced from the Mystery of Golgotha to Pentecost, which had remained hidden in their subconscious. Especially the ten days between the so-called Ascension until the Pentecost event seemed to be a period of deep sleep. Looking back, however, the time between the Mystery of Golgotha and the Ascension of Christ Jesus emerged day by day. They had experienced it, but it only emerged now, and in a remarkable way.

Excuse me if I add a personal comment. I must admit that I was astonished when I became aware of how what they experienced between the Mystery of Golgotha and the so-called Ascension emerged in the apostles' souls. Images like these: Yes, you were together with him who was born on the cross, you encountered him – like when one wakes up in the morning and it seems like out of a dream emerges: you were with someone during the night. But it was peculiar how the individual events emerged in the apostles' souls. They had to ask themselves: Who was it with whom we were together? And they didn't recognize him again and again. They knew: We certainly wandered around with him – but they didn't recognize him in the form in which he then stood before them, and which now appeared in images as they received fecundation by all-encompassing love. They saw themselves wandering after the Mystery of Golgotha with him whom we call Christ. And they saw how he had really taught them about the kingdom of the spirit. And they were able to understand how they had wandered with the being who was born on the cross, how this being – the all-encompassing love born from the cosmos – was their teacher, how they were not mature enough to understand what this being had to say, how they had to receive it with the subconscious powers of their souls and couldn't receive what this being had to give with normal reason, how they went like sleepwalkers alongside Christ during those forty days and couldn't understand with normal reason what he had to give them. He appeared to them as their spiritual teacher and instructed them in secrets which they could only understand when he transferred them to a completely different consciousness. And now they realized that they had been with the Christ, had walked with the resurrected Christ. Now they realized what had happened to him. But how did they recognize that he was really the same one with whom they had traveled with love before the Mystery of Golgotha? That happened as follows.

Let us imagine that such an image appeared before the soul of one of the apostles after Pentecost. He saw that he had walked with the resurrected one. But he didn't recognize him. He saw a heavenly spiritual being, but he didn't recognize him. Another image, which showed that the apostles had really been with Christ Jesus before the Mystery of Golgotha, interfered with the purely spiritual one. There was a scene in which they felt they were instructed in the secrets of the spirit by Christ Jesus. But they didn't recognize him, they saw themselves standing before this spiritual being. And in order to recognize him, this image was transformed into the image of the Last Supper, which they had experienced together with Christ Jesus. Just imagine that the apostle had before him the super-sensible experience of the resurrected one and, as though hovering in the background, the image of the Last Supper. Then they recognized that the one with whom they had wandered with love was the same as the one who now taught them, in a completely different form, which he had taken on after the Mystery of Golgotha. It was a flowing together of the memories from the sleeping consciousness with the memories which preceded it. They experienced two images: one image of the occurrences after the Mystery of Golgotha, and one of the occurrences before their consciousness had been dimmed. They therefore realized that the two beings belong together: the resurrected one and he with whom they had lovingly wandered a relatively short time ago. And they thought: Before we were awakened through the fecundation by all-encompassing love, our normal consciousness was taken away. And Christ, the resurrected one, was with us. He had taken us into his kingdom without our knowing it; he wandered with us and revealed to us the secrets of his kingdom, which now, after the Pentecost-Mystery, emerge as having been experienced in a dream.

This is what causes such astonishment: the coinciding of an image of an apostle's experience with the Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha with an image before the Mystery of Golgotha, which they experienced in the physical body in a normal state of consciousness.

We have begun to indicate what can be read in the so-called Fifth Gospel, and I would like to say a few words to you at the end of this report as an aside. I feel myself obliged to speak of these things now. What I would like to say though, is the following. I know very well that we live in a time in which much is being prepared for the earthly future of humanity, and that we within our – now Anthroposophical – Society, should realize that something must be prepared for the future in human souls. I know that the time will come when one will be able to speak of such things in a different way than is allowed in our times. For we are all children of our time. But a near future will come in which one can speak more precisely, in which perhaps much of what can be perceived today only by way of indication will be much more precisely perceived in the spiritual Script of Becoming. Such times will come, even though it seems so improbable to the people of today. Nevertheless, it is just for this reason that a certain obligation exists to speak of these things today as a kind of preparation. And although I had to overcome a certain resistance to speak on this theme, the obligation for preparation in these our times outweighed the resistance. That led to my speaking to you for the first time about these things.

When I say “overcoming”, please understand the word as it is meant. I explicitly request that what I have to say on this occasion be understood as a stimulation, as something which in the future will be explained much better and more precisely. And you will understand the word “overcoming” better if you allow me to make a personal remark. It is completely clear to me that for the spiritual investigation to which I have devoted myself, it is at first extremely difficult to extract many things from the Script of the World – especially things of this nature! And I would not be surprised if the word “indication”, which I used, may have a more difficult and broader meaning than it normally has. I can not at all say that I am able today to say precisely what is in the Spiritual Script. For it is very difficult and takes much effort to extract images from the Akasha Record which have to with Christianity. It takes much effort to give these images the necessary condensation, to hold them fast, and I consider it my karma that my duty is to say what I am saying. Without doubt it would cost me less effort if in my early youth I had received a real Christian upbringing. I did not have that; I was brought up in a completely free cultural environment. My education was purely scientific. And for that reason it costs me effort to find these things about which I am obligated to speak.

I make this personal comment for two reasons: because of a peculiar unscrupulousness, a foolish, silly fairy tale about my relationship with certain Catholic currents is being spread about. Not one word of this is true. And what that which is often called Theosophy today has come to may be judged by the fact that such unscrupulous assertions and rumors come from that source. And because we are obliged to tell the truth and not avoid such assertions, this personal remark is made.

On the other hand, due to my lack of contact with Christianity during my youth I feel more objective about Christianity and believe that I have been led to Christianity and to Christ by the spirit. Especially in this area I think I have a certain right to claim objectivity and lack of prejudice. Perhaps one can rely more on the words of a person who comes from a scientific background, who in his youth was distant from Christianity, than one who had a relationship with Christianity from early youth on. But when you hear these words, you may feel an indication of what lives in me when I speak about the secrets which I would like to call the secrets of the so-called Fifth Gospel.

Dear attendees,

Anthroposophy, which I have been privileged to represent here for many years now, is initially met with disbelief for a very specific reason: because its particular modes of knowledge not only require it to speak about different things than one is accustomed to hearing in scientific circles today, but also to speak in a different way, to have a different mode of expression. This, however, my dear ladies and gentlemen, does not only lead to the essence of anthroposophy in an external, formal way, but, as the considerations of this evening for a particular case would like to show, leads deep into the whole essence of the anthroposophical world view.

The ideas and concepts in which Anthroposophy expresses what it gains in a certain way through so-called supersensible knowledge have, in contrast to the concepts that one is accustomed to in scientific life today, something, one may say, more vividly. Without abandoning its scientific basis, it stands out in a certain way from that which is only bound to the outer world of facts that can be perceived by the senses and reached by the intellect. From this outer world of facts, anthroposophy turns to another world of facts, and from this other world of facts it must not only proclaim something other than what the senses are able to see, but it must also speak in a different way.

This can be seen particularly clearly in the fact that most intensely characterizes human earthly destiny: the fact of death. For human hopes of being able to transcend one's own nature through death are connected with the fact of death; the problem of immortality is connected with the problem of death. And talking about the problem of immortality today is considered unscientific.

Now, my dear audience, when we consider such a fundamental question, such a fundamental riddle of life, we must draw attention to the way in which the way of thinking is expressed in the most diverse ways across the different regions of the earth. I would like to say: we here, within the German world of Central Europe, are precisely wedged between the West and the East with such questions. And I would like to point out, just by way of introduction, the Western way of thinking and the Eastern way of thinking, and then show how it may be incumbent on the German mind, precisely by avoiding the one-sidedness of the West and the East, to arrive at a higher level of knowledge in this field.

If we look across to the West, we encounter above all a thinker who has also profoundly influenced Central and Eastern European thought for almost a century, a thinker who has had more influence on Central European scientific concepts in particular than is usually realized. He is Herbert Spencer. He looks at human life, and it is most interesting to take his view of life where he applies it to the problem of education. He asks: What must be the real goal of human education? And he comes to say – as I said, I will only mention this in the introduction, not explain it – he comes to say that the real goal of education must be to make proper parents and educators out of all people. Now, what he presents as the goal of education may be of little interest to us today, but the reason why he recognizes this goal of education as his own is. He says: human development reaches a certain conclusion at the moment when a person becomes capable of reproduction, when a person thus enters into sexual maturity. And if the power to produce one's own kind is the highest that a person can achieve in the course of their life, then the highest goal of education must also be to educate and teach these descendants in the appropriate way. And it is clear from the context as a whole, rather than from this single assertion, that this Western thinker actually sees a sure cognitive insight into the human being only by pursuing natural processes to their peak, to the point of producing the same; that he regards, so to speak, everything that man has to strive for most significantly after he has reached sexual maturity, that he regards all so-called intellectual development only as a kind of superstructure, only as a kind of appendage, one might almost say, to the secure natural foundation of human development.

Now it is extremely interesting to contrast this Western thinker with an Eastern thinker: Vladimir Soloviev, the most significant Russian thinker of the most recent period, who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose most important works thus extend well into the present day. From a completely different spirit, from completely different psychological backgrounds, we hear this Eastern thinker speak; in that – one might say – although he expresses himself entirely in Western and Central European thought forms, the whole of the Orient still resonates emotionally and sentimentally, which everywhere nuances what he has to say in a warm, deeply intimate way.

Solowjow now also speaks about the human course of life. And he says: Man must have two goals in life. One goal can only be the striving for perfection through ever further and further advancement in the knowledge of the truth, but the other must be to live in that which gives man immortality. One might say that Solowjow speaks not from abstract concepts but from the full human experience when he says that life, which would only perfect itself in truth, would be meaningless if it were not accompanied by immortality immortality, because without immortality the striving for truth, for perfection in truth, would be senseless, a simple dying down, a passing away of the being; the striving for truth would be senseless. And an immortality without the striving for truth would be equally senseless; life would be a world deception if the striving for truth were not accompanied by the fact of immortality. And it is precisely against this background that Solowjow speaks out sharply against what Herbert Spencer sets as the goal of human development, not mentioning Spencer on this occasion, but discussing it himself. He says: Let us just assume that this development of humanity would consist solely of individual generations producing further generations, thus the same always producing the same; a rolling wheel of this kind would be the most senseless thing imaginable.

Now, my dear audience, if we go deeper into the basis of these two completely opposing views, we find a very different way of living in the soul life. In the work of Herbert Spencer, one finds a thorough familiarity with the concepts that have emerged as scientific concepts in the development of humanity over the past few centuries, and one finds his view that truth and knowledge can only be attained with such concepts. We find that Solowjow expresses himself entirely in the same conceptual worlds as the Western thinker, but at the same time we find that he speaks from something in man that does not dissolve into these concepts, that only makes use of these concepts as if they were a language. And one has the feeling that old times of human cultural development, old times of human thinking are coming to life in a religiously colored world view in Vladimir Solovyov, the thinker of the East, and that something deeper in human nature is speaking than that which can be expressed in the external, sensory and intellectual representations.

But while we find, I might say, strictly reasoned logic in Spencer, and while one moves in the element of a certain certainty of concepts and ideas when pondering him, in Solovyov we find something is at work that cannot be grasped with the same certainty; in his work one finds something that seeks to renew the leap beyond the conceptual world of the old thinkers, the old visionaries. And in modern times, when discussing the deepest riddles of human existence, one feels caught between these two worlds. But perhaps one may say: It is the destiny of Central Europe to observe the two one-sidedness in the way of development and to seek a way that goes beyond both, which then leads into a real supersensible world, in which the problem of death on the one hand, that of immortality on the other, can really come before the human soul in a satisfying way. This path, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophical research is trying to take.

Anthroposophical research can neither remain within the Western conceptual world nor in that world which, I would say, only makes external use of concepts like a language, but which draws from a more or less mystical darkness that characterizes the Oriental essence. On the one hand, the anthroposophical method of research must avoid losing itself in this mystical darkness; on the other hand, it must try to overcome that which always wants to keep the human being, who only lives in concepts, within the sensory world. This can be shown particularly clearly if we first consider, outwardly, that which intrudes into human life as the most intense destiny, if we consider death, in order to then ascend in the realization of the grasp of death to the grasp of immortality.

Death confronts us within nature itself, to which man belongs with one side of his being, as the great riddle of existence. And if we could link it, on the one hand, to what Herbert Spencer presents as the goal of the human life cycle – the generation of the same – and, on the other hand, to what Vladimir Solovjov addresses to immortality, not as a non-logical but as a purely human appeal Vladimir Solovjow addresses to immortality, then one would give human knowledge only that conclusion, which makes it from a mere factor dominating the external world to one that can now also carry the internal of man with certainty and with a firm hold through life.

Let us look, then, my dear audience, at how death manifests itself in the natural existence of man; and let me be clear: today I will speak only about human death, not about the types of death that we can observe in the animal world and even down to the plant world. Within the human world, how does death confront us? It draws together in a certain sense into a single moment – precisely at the moment of the conclusion of life – and that is what makes it so mysterious. We live our lives, we enjoy this life of ours, we make use of it in the outer realm of humanity and the world, and we do not immediately become aware of death in this experience of existence, but only as a riddle about a fact, that this life, as we live it every day, simply comes to an end.

When we now place this single fact of life before our soul, what do we actually find there? Man leaves behind from his life in the physical world that which we call a corpse. The substances and the forces in this corpse are in a certain connection; when the human being has become a physical corpse, they are in such a connection that they cannot remain in it, and they must emerge from it , and this must happen through the same forces, through the same natural laws that we find all over the world externally with our senses and with our intellect, into which we are placed in a sensory way. It must be said that, in a certain sense, the human material and energetic context is taken over by that world when death occurs, from which we actually draw our knowledge from birth to death, insofar as it is knowledge of the senses and mind.

And what does this external world actually do to the human corpse? It dissolves the human corpse, destroys its form, and in other words, it causes it to pass from the individual existence in which it was enclosed from birth to death into a general physical world existence. We look at this physical world existence, and must initially call it “the conclusion of life”. We must admit, when we follow the processes that the human corpse undergoes from the onset of death until it is completely dissolved in the course of the world, that these are processes that are completely unlike those that - albeit initially unknown to human knowledge - clearly take place until death. For as soon as death occurs, as soon as the external forces of the world take over the human corpse, its components, its forces, take different paths, initially for the outer sense existence, than they did between birth and death.

Between birth and death they are held together by something, whether this something is conceived as this or that, or perhaps even denied, and everything that is present is pushed into a mere different context during life, as that which is after death, but this context must at least be called a different one. And so, on the one hand, the human physical body after death, absorbed by the general forces of nature; on the other hand, this same human body, removed from general dissolution, renewing itself again and again from birth to death, maintaining its individual form. The contrast, the polar contrast, is initially a great one, and the question must be asked: How can knowledge come to terms with this polar contrast?

Well, my dear audience, it will never come to terms with it unless it appeals to that which anthroposophical research wants to introduce into scientific life, that which I have tried to characterize in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds » as a path that leads beyond mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, in that the human being becomes aware of certain deeper powers of knowledge present in the human soul, which are simply not applied by ordinary consciousness. These powers are always present in the human soul. Ordinary consciousness leaves them lying in the unconscious; the higher path of knowledge brings them up through meditation and concentration. The seeker devotes himself to certain exercises, intimate soul exercises, through which he strengthens thinking, feeling and willing, thereby evoking more intense experiences in the soul for this soul life than are ordinary experiences. But in this way he also rises above what ordinary knowledge can achieve.

Today I cannot go into a description of this particular path, which I have given here several times. It will be touched on in my lecture next Tuesday here in Stuttgart. Today I just want to point out that this path consists of the soul forces that every person has at the bottom of their soul being raised through meditation, through concentration of the soul life, and being applied to the world.

And what happens as a result? As a result, dear attendees, a third state of consciousness is added to the two in which a person alternates in ordinary life. The two states of consciousness that I have in mind are the one that we have from morning till evening, which encompasses our ordinary mental life and also encompasses everything that external science regards as accessible – it is precisely the state of waking; the other state of consciousness cannot really even be called a state of consciousness in the proper sense – it is the state of sleep. But out of this state emerges the strange life of human dreaming – that human dreaming that is perhaps accepted in a superstitious way by one person, marveled at by another, regarded by a third as something mysterious and unknown , but which draws the attention of very many people to the fact that perhaps the directing of the soul's gaze precisely to this emergence of dream waves from the deep ocean depths of the human soul life could have a special importance for the knowledge of the whole of life. Of course, anthroposophy has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of dream-related superstition. However, if it does not draw any knowledge from the dream life – that is quite beyond it – it must at least point to something deeply enigmatic and vitally important in the dream world. It must say the following to justify itself.

Is not that to which ordinary knowledge surrenders also something turned away from life when we surrender to life in the usual robust way, when we live our existence in the world only by exerting our physical bodies from morning till night? What we call knowledge, even in ordinary life, cannot come about through this. The finer concepts, the more intimate connections with the world that are sought through knowledge, depend – initially in a formal way – on the external, robust way of life. In a sense, one has to retreat to a place of existence in knowledge that lies apart from the external life. And yet, one must admit that through that which one intimately explores in this remote place, by observing, experimenting, and thereby going beyond the ordinary course of existence with observation and experiment, that precisely through this light comes into life; that light comes into life from something that withdraws from life. Could it not also be the case that the mysterious world of dreams is initially meaningless for the external, robust life, but that it is precisely in its remoteness, and in a remoteness in a higher sense than ordinary knowledge, that it points to the essence of life?

And indeed, this dream world, that which resonates and vibrates from the time we spend between falling asleep and waking up into the waking consciousness, contains something that can indeed be further developed. And this further development happens precisely through the higher knowledge of the human being, through the attainment of a third state of consciousness. Through the intensification of thinking, feeling and willing, something is achieved that is, on the one hand, similar to the world of sleep, out of which dreaming arises, and, on the other hand, is completely opposed to it. When we say we fall asleep, we let the dream sound from the world of sleep; so we have to say: in the world of supersensible consciousness, into which anthroposophical research wants to penetrate, there is not a falling asleep, but on the contrary a higher awakening. There is an experience in a world that is similar to and yet very different from the world of dreams; similar in that it ceases when we submerge into the full physical life with the dream world, which, after all, flits past us in moments, say, of waking up, and immediately gives way to the life that permeates the thoughts imbued with will. The life in consciousness that is attained in the manner indicated can and must likewise cease when it submerges into ordinary human corporeality. Just as the dream fades away, so the higher consciousness ceases when it submerges into corporeality. This waking up, this higher state of consciousness, if I may use the much-debated term, hovers, I would like to say, in a lightness just like that of the dream world – but on the other hand it is opposed to it because it is interspersed with certain thoughts in just as strict a sense as waking daytime cognition.

Thus, anthroposophical research consists in an advance to a knowledge that is experienced with a lightness like a dream, but at the same time it is experienced with a firmness that is only possible if it is logical in the context of knowledge. But one thing is the case with both. When one becomes conscious of the complete context with one's corporeality from one or the other area of consciousness, then one or the other occurs in such a form that the dream is extinguished by the waking day life, can at most remain as a memory, but as a memory it integrates itself into the waking day life , but the content of higher knowledge is not erased, but stands alongside ordinary daytime cognition, but stands in such a way that it clearly stands out from it, so that the person can then experience his own existence as if he had two personalities, one can control the other, can illuminate what he has in ordinary consciousness in the waking state from morning to evening, with the higher knowledge that he has attained, which in turn he can control through his ordinary logical thinking, in order to experience how it relates to what can be experienced in the sensory world. This higher knowledge places us in a purely soul-spiritual experience, one that is full of content and inner reality. Just as in the ordinary life of the senses one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and reality itself in life, just as one can distinguish between the mere idea of a hot iron and the real hot iron that one touches through life itself, so one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and what is really seen in higher knowledge, what is directly experienced.

But this reality confronts man in such a way that it constitutes the complete opposite of what confronts us in natural death. In natural death, as we have seen, the human body is taken up by the general, natural laws of the world, which dissolve it, take away its form, and allow it to merge into their general existence. In higher knowledge, the soul life becomes more powerful, permeates itself with purely soul-spiritual reality, and comprehends itself in purely soul-spiritual reality. But it does not flow out into the general laws of nature as the human body does after death. It does not flow out into the general laws of nature, and this soul-spiritual experience does not flow into any general laws of the world either.

In this soul-spiritual experience, we become acquainted with something that must be said to be different from what we otherwise experience between birth and death in our waking daily life; it is something viewed from within that is as different from this waking daily life as the dead corpse is different from the living human body that we carry within us between birth and death. We look at something from the outside in the human corpse, which allows us to approach the mystery of death in the realm of nature; we look at something that is different in its innermost being from what we carry within us between birth and death in the same organism. And in higher knowledge we behold something — spiritually, inwardly — that is just as different from all that we experience inwardly, spiritually, through our human organism, which in death becomes the corpse. One would like to say: On the one hand, the dead corpse has separated from life for our external view; for our inner view, that which can be seen as a spiritual-soul reality in higher knowledge has separated from the same experience before our soul's gaze.

My dear attendees! In this confrontation with death staring at us from nature, when we look at it, I would say, in the form in which it presents itself to us, when we follow the fate of the human corpse after death, in the confrontation of this fact of death and that which knowledge — when the human being brings the soul forces that exist subconsciously, one could also say superconsciously, into his soul life —, in this juxtaposition lies that from which, in a certain sense, the most important problems of human life arise, even before anthroposophical research. It is an inward consolidation, an inward strengthening of oneself in that which one grasps as one's own spiritual-soul life. One feels as if one has been returned to one's innermost being, one feels completely within oneself by grasping oneself in this one's spiritual-soul reality, apart from the life between birth and death.

And a special shade of the idea that he gets from this view arises for him when he contrasts this idea with the idea of natural death. But then, when man has experienced through higher knowledge this reality consolidated in himself, this strengthened spiritual-soul life, and then immersed again in the physical body, that is, as I have mentioned, the consciousness that gives higher knowledge and the consciousness that is bound to the body, which accompanies us during physical life between birth and death, from waking up to falling asleep.

When these two are juxtaposed, when one penetrates the human being in his ordinary physical existence with what he appears to be, when he beholds his true, higher existence, then – my dear audience – one encounters the riddle of death for the second time, and one encounters it in a way that is not presented in ordinary life and ordinary science. Then one plunges back into the physical organization with that which first emerged from the tool of the body, from the entire physical organization; and one experiences this physical organization in a different way than in ordinary life. One experiences now what it means that we indeed carry within us during our physical life that which falls away from us at death as a corpse, which must move according to completely different physical laws after death than during physical life. And one actually sees that this moment of death stands out as a separate event in human life. You now feel in recognition: You carry within you all the time that which you see in a dead person in physical relationship with the destructive forces before you; you always carry these destructive forces within you. This is a significant realization, my dear audience!

One submerges oneself with one's soul-spiritual existence, which one has glimpsed through higher knowledge, into the physical body and only now does one find out how one actually carries the powers of death within oneself continuously; and how these powers of death are now continually overcome by the life forces, how a continuous struggle takes place in the human organism, the struggle that takes place between the powers of death and the life forces. Only now do we begin to feel what it actually means when waking and sleeping alternate in ordinary life. We feel that the whole human being in sleep leaves the physical body just as the human being with higher knowledge, which I have described, leaves this physical body. But one also feels how, in the ordinary life between birth and death, man relies on the use of his physical body to exercise his logical powers and his powers of thought. For when he is not in his physical body during sleep, he at most brings it to a confused, chaotic dream life, which must immediately vanish when man submerges into the physical body. But through higher knowledge one also learns to see what is continuously at work in the human body, which counteracts the dissolving forces that are in us from birth to death. One learns to recognize that this counteraction is most intense precisely from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. And one learns to recognize how the waking life with its thoughts is connected to that which manifests itself separately with the corpse. One learns to recognize how one actually always carries within oneself the forces that are active in the corpse as the forces of dying. And through higher knowledge one learns that we initially carry those thoughts through which we permeate and order our existence in ordinary life, and that we actually handle it in the right way, that we cannot carry these thoughts up into higher knowledge. Into this higher knowledge, into this higher reality, we carry, my dear audience, only a part of our emotional and volitional life from our ordinary daily life, and in a higher world we acquire new thoughts. The sphere of thought that is bound to the physical body and one sees: is bound to that in the physical body which is always in us, which are the dying forces, this sphere of thought is grasped with higher knowledge. One also realizes that one had to strengthen thinking, feeling and willing in order to carry the thoughts that our physical body carries in our ordinary life, in order to carry the self.

For this reason, my dear audience, the whole inner soul life and the whole inner spiritual life must be strengthened and strengthened for the sake of higher knowledge. What we can leave to the forces of the body in our ordinary life, we must carry and accomplish ourselves in the spiritual-soul realm in higher knowledge. And we experience this personal contribution. We experience thoughts that are not bound to the outer, physical body, that are world thoughts. We do not experience natural laws, we experience world thoughts! Through higher knowledge, we experience the way in which what is outer world revelation is created and formed out of world thought. And what the ordinary world of thought is, and what the world of thought is that one only enters with higher knowledge, is revealed to this higher consciousness. One now learns to recognize the intimate connection between the forces of dying and death in human nature and the forces that actually express themselves in our thinking, in our ordinary imagination, from the moment we wake until we fall asleep.

We are in a dull state of consciousness that only reaches as far as dreams, which are only brightened up by higher knowledge and thus also become transparent. This state of consciousness also only reaches as far as the world of images in dreams, which is not permeated by thoughts. In order to have thoughts in ordinary consciousness, one must descend into the physical organism, which carries the forces of dying and of death within itself. And if we did not have these dying and these death forces, we would not have a self-contained world of thoughts in ordinary consciousness between birth and death.

We are now learning how the human being must, as it were, harden himself to a physical organization that wrests itself from him, that works in the same way as the physical forces work in death, which can only be overcome by the human being being permeated by his soul and spirit. One learns to recognize these powers of dying and death through the fact that, with higher knowledge, one has a world of thoughts that does not descend into these powers of dying and death. And so spiritual life is placed alongside natural death for this higher knowledge, and so man learns to recognize how precisely the powers of thought – those powers that connect our inner life with the world of the senses, that convey the external world – how these powers of thought are bound to the dissolving, to the dying powers of the human organism. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a significant insight, for it allows us to see the riddle of death in a new light. We see that we have not only the essence of death before us when it appears to us as the final enigmatic link, as the conclusion of physical life, but we perceive death as it continuously works between birth and death in the human being, and we perceive its intimate connection with the ordinary life of thought. But with that – my dear audience – the essence of this thought life also becomes clear to us.

It is precisely because what we carry in our soul in terms of feeling and will must, so to speak, combine with the dying forces in order to be permeated by the world of thought that we need for our ordinary life, our soul life takes on the character that it has developed to its highest flowering in the present age, of which it is most eminently and rightly proud.

Let us try to imagine what this world of thought, which we now know to be bound to the forces of dying and of death in man, is capable of. It is capable of penetrating into what is also outwardly dead nature, and in this respect, more recent knowledge has celebrated its great, justified triumphs. It has spread more and more over the field of dead, inorganic, inanimate nature; it wants to see through this dead, this inanimate nature in such a way that one day — this is its ideal — it will be able to see the emergence of the living within the dead, like a combination of the forces that work within the dead. Today, in a certain respect, it is believed that we are on the way to such an understanding of the organic from the inorganic. But even if such an ideal of scientific knowledge, which is entirely justified in its field, could be fulfilled, we will only recognize that which is dead in the living. Allow me to express this in the following way, ladies and gentlemen.

When I look at a plant, I see a living thing, in which substances revolve and forces are at work. Within that which I have before my eyes in this living thing, the same forces and laws are at work that I explore in physics and chemistry; there is a physicality, a chemistry within it. This physicality, this chemistry, is present within the living thing in a different way than outside of it, but it is only within this living thing that it is inanimate. And it may be possible to see through the particular way in which this non-living manifests itself in the living, but one still remains only with the non-living. And one remains with the non-living even when one studies it up to the point of understanding the human being. The human being carries within himself the forces, the mode of action of dead matter. But precisely because he carries these forces of dead material within him, this means that he always has death and dying within him. Through higher knowledge, one gains insight into the fact that the human being thinks in the ordinary consciousness by carrying this inanimate, this inorganic, this continually equipping him with dying forces. It is significant to see through the fact that man must see that which he recognizes as his highest in physical life as being bound to that which is constantly detaching itself from life, that is, that man can think, that he is constantly detaching the forces of the dead from life.

And that is why it also happens that at the same moment that the life processes increase in the ordinary physical life – let us say in fever or abnormal, morbid conditions – that then the human consciousness also turns into the morbid; that a person can only have a healthy consciousness when the life forces, the effervescent, warm life forces, are kept in check by the forces of death. Thoughts, as we have them in ordinary life, are placed in the powers of mind and will that are bound to the living; they are placed in these by the fact that the powers of death are placed in human life. The conscious powers of thought of physical life are bound to death and dying, are inwardly connected, most intimately, with these powers of death and dying.

And so, through such contemplation, what we encounter in the external knowledge of the inanimate, the inorganic, is put into perspective. If we become acquainted with the world of ideas and concepts in all its human aspects, as it appears in its highest development between birth and death in physical life, then we perceive it as something that is given in its nature, in its essence, to the inanimate, and is also given to external, dead nature. And one discovers the great law of human existence: because in us the powers of thought and knowledge are connected with the powers of death, we can therefore only know the inorganic, the inanimate, in the ordinary way. But when higher spiritual knowledge, such as anthroposophical research strives for, enters into this life, then ordinary thoughts are, as it were, raised into a higher sphere, just as that which is continually dying and decaying in man, that which is a continually active corpse with the destructive forces that dissolve its form, is raised into life. And we have – my dear audience – a self-living process before us in the transition from ordinary knowledge to anthroposophical knowledge.

We recognize the ideas, the concepts of ordinary knowledge as bound to death; we recognize that which anthroposophical knowledge strives for as that which resurrects the ordinary, dead, inanimate concepts and ideas to life. We recognize not only a formal process of knowledge, we recognize a vitalization of our soul life; we recognize a direct presentation of that which has nothing to do with birth and death, which really goes beyond birth and death because it does not partake of the forces of death and dying. We recognize the immortal part of the human being and learn to distinguish it from that which is continually bound to death. In this way, as in higher knowledge, I would say that spiritual life arises from natural death, not just a spiritual, formal knowledge. That is why, my dear audience, this anthroposophical knowledge initially seems strange to people. It is usually taken as a mere continuation of ordinary knowledge. It is that in the full sense of the word, but it is a continuation in such a way that the character, the whole nature of this ordinary knowledge is also changed, that we experience something like a birth of a living being within the thoughts and ideas that are otherwise only useful for the inanimate, within those thoughts that I have called world thoughts. In today's meditation, we are confronted with that into which the human being is first absorbed when he separates as a spiritual soul from his life between birth and death. When his physical self separates through natural death, his body is absorbed into the general natural forces and his form is destroyed. When the spiritual soul is absorbed into the world that the higher knowledge already reaches in a cognitively alive way, then the human being is consolidated. Then the human being is not dissolved into the rest of the world; then he enters the spiritual world with his full individuality – yes, [this higher individuality is strengthened, intensified] – he enters the spiritual world with this world.

In this way, by developing the powers of human consciousness, anthroposophical knowledge seeks to approach the problem of immortality. And you see, my dear audience: for this anthroposophical knowledge, it is important to approach this problem of immortality not just by philosophizing about the immortal, but by researching: Where in the human being is the immortal to be found? It can be found through higher knowledge, when one reaches that which, by returning to the body, objectively beholds death in its perpetual activity in us and therefore knows what alone can succumb to death.

Only that which is already continually in the bosom of this death can succumb to it. By seeing through the continuous dying, the actual moment of death is recognized only as a kind of summary of that which is always there. And while we are constantly saving our life, I might say, from death, by always overcoming the forces of death in the physical life, but overcoming them by the fact that within us there is always that which is only seen by higher knowledge, so in physical death, by this the spiritual soul in us, precisely in physical death, that which in its individual addenda, in its individual elements, must be overcome from moment to moment of life, is overcome – completely overcome, I might say – in physical death. We overcome natural death in every moment through our spiritual life, which has nothing to do with death. And when one acquires such knowledge of the overcoming of mortality through immortality, then the riddle of death also presents itself to the human soul in precisely that renewed form, which I took the liberty of describing to you this evening, my dear audience.

And therein lie the reasons why anthroposophy must not only speak about other things, but also differently than ordinary science. It must derive its concepts and ideas, which are, after all, about spiritual worlds, from what we have in our ordinary minds as concepts and ideas and which can only be applied to the dead because they come from death and dying. And therefore only those can enter into this world of thought that carry the will within themselves to pass over from dead concepts to living concepts; that carry the will within themselves to shape the activity of the soul in such a way that they grasp that which must be grasped in life, and not just grasp in a comfortable way that which can only be grasped in death. Today, we largely form our physiology, our anthropology, by observing human beings after death and then constructing life out of death. Anthroposophy attempts to enliven that in the human being that is bound to death and thus to bring the inner soul world itself, as living spirituality, up to a higher level of knowledge.

You certainly do not have to become a researcher in this field yourself — I have taken the liberty of mentioning this here a few times — to penetrate the justification of the anthroposophical world. Those who become researchers have the spiritual world directly before them, as I have been describing it here for years. They then describe it from what arises for them when they translate what they see into the form of human thought. But in describing it, they appeal not only to their own seeing, but also to the inner human liveliness. And because every human being has this inner life, just as they have their own dying process, they can gradually, even if they do not become researchers in the field of spiritual science and anthroposophy, acquire an understanding of what researchers bring out of the spiritual world. The publication of such writings as my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' indicates how anyone can at least get started on their own research into the spiritual world. But it also indicates that such books are primarily written as they are so that everyone can, so to speak, receive the spiritual researcher's justification for what he actually does. But that which comes before humanity as ideas, as concepts, can be grasped by common sense. For this common sense is that which can rise to living thoughts just as it can remain with dead thoughts. And this understanding is not mere belief, not mere emotional understanding, but it is an understanding that arises out of the free nature of the human being, which simply connects what is in it of world existence with what can be proclaimed through research out of this world existence.

It must always be emphasized that anthroposophy is, so to speak, handed over to the world so that it can be tested by ordinary, healthy human understanding. If one practices this, allows it to be lived out in a comprehensive, not a one-sided way, then one will see how one relates to anthroposophy differently than one still often believes today. We can then look at concepts such as those of Herbert Spencer, which only remain within physical life, as I described in my introduction. On the other hand, we can look at concepts such as those of Vladimir Soloviev, which arise out of the fullness of human life. We shall see in the case of Herbert Spencer why he has to stop at physical life, because everything he expresses comes from a way of thinking that is bound up with the forces of dying and of death. And we shall see in the case of Soloviev that although he uses concepts that are common in the West and that to a great extent contain the conceptual form associated with dying and death, But in the case of Solowjow, we shall see how these concepts remain external to him, but how he dreams up what he actually wants to say out of a mystical darkness and a mystical depth, and thus becomes one-sided on the other side as well.

We will see in anthroposophy how it does not simply take what is dead in the Western world and use it as a means of expression, but how it brings what is dead to life itself, how it leads from the mortal to the immortal by awakening what is dead to life.

It seems to me, honored attendees, that Central Europe, with the special preconditions for its thinking, feeling and willing — these great upswings that have come to light in Goethe and those who, so to speak, can be described as being within Goetheanism — the task of avoiding both one-sidedness by continuing in the direction of these endeavors and in fact of elevating our scientific conceptual world, which fetters us to the earth and can only truly say something about natural death, to a spiritual life that has something to say about immortality.

Many will object: this science, which you describe as anthroposophy, is, as it were, suspended in mid-air; one is not standing on the firm ground of fact. My dear ladies and gentlemen! I have tried to show you today how anthroposophy can only be properly understood if it is considered in the context of the whole process of world evolution and the place of human beings in this process. If we look at what is around us here on earth, we have to say of everything: it needs a foundation on which it stands. If we were to hold an earthly object in the air, it would fall down. That which surrounds us in our immediate environment needs a foundation; that which surrounds us in our immediate knowledge of the life between birth and death, the facts of the external sense world and the combining intellect, needs to have such a foundation in order to exist spiritually. At the same moment when we look out from earthly life into the life of the world, it would be foolish to say that the earth needs a foundation on which it rests in order to exist in the world.

In the world of space, we have already become accustomed to the fact that one cosmic body freely maintains the balance of the other through the forces that unfold such a foundation. As science rises from the mortal to the immortal, it must realize that it must take the same path in the spiritual-soul realm as that which confronts us in the mortal. For knowledge, it needs a basis. That which confronts us in the world of the immortal in the various fields must support itself. And until we are able to grasp this image, we will not understand how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to external science, which it does not deny but fully recognizes. But spiritual science must not only research different things from ordinary science, it must also research differently and speak differently.

That was what I wanted to present to your soul through today's contemplation, based on the essence of this spiritual science, and what I would now like to summarize in a few words, saying: a more intimate contemplation of the position of anthroposophy and the world brings us to a very special view of the relationship between natural death and spiritual life. But we can only gain such an insight if we fulfill what Anthroposophy basically calls out to us from the deeper nature of the world itself, by saying: Human being, if you want to recognize that which lives immortal in the spirit, first enliven your own world of knowledge. If you want to grasp life in the spirit, first enliven your knowledge within you. Understand what it means when it is said not in dead but in living concepts. Rise up from that which, as dead matter, needs a support, to that which, as spiritual, moves freely in the spiritual, in the spiritual worlds, which is not bound to that which lives and weaves in the transitory, which lives in itself and which can be grasped can be grasped by man when he presents the great, significant antitheses before his soul: natural death in itself, the spiritual life that he can grasp when he frees himself from that which is bound to the transitory in earthly life!

Let us survey a few cosmological facts. Evolution is focused on the development of states of consciousness. The present state of consciousness is one stage – it is the fourth. It has been preceded by three and will be followed by three. We are now in the waking state.

The seer, looking back into the past, finds that this was preceded by a dream state; somewhat lighter than in our more highly developed animals; and duller, but more comprehensive than present-day man can imagine. This consciousness included the plant world. Man could then see life flowing through the plants, germinating, sprouting. It is something that we still find in some mediums: a duller but more comprehensive state of consciousness.

Before that, we find a state that we can call sleep trance; it is even duller and even more comprehensive; the entities were able to see not only life, but also directly pain and joy; today we can only see the gestures of it. The dream state symbolized pain and joy through form, just as dreams still symbolize today. Everything was expressed in symbolic forms in those days, and our present-day symbolizing is an atavism of the earlier state of consciousness. Even the sleep trance, this dreamless sleep consciousness, can still be studied in mediums today.

The third state of consciousness – looking backwards – is the deep trance; it is also called the induced trance. It is very rare today, but can be achieved in pathological states, and then the medium constructs chains of worlds.

So we have come to know four states of consciousness: deep trance, dreamless sleep, the dream state and waking daytime consciousness. Man has gone through these four states. What has been achieved at each stage must be summarized and passed on to the next in the bud.

This gathering together is called Pralaya, the unfolding is called Manvantara; the state of consciousness itself is called a planet.

The next state that awaits us is the psychic state, which is similar to the previous one and is associated with an expansion, but at the same time a maintenance of the waking state of consciousness. The consciousness now advances in stages: the expansion occurs, but with an alert daytime consciousness. This is the development of the clairvoyant. All the theosophical teachings come from this expanded state of daytime consciousness. This psychic state of consciousness now grants the clairvoyant insight into the beautiful life stream that can be seen flowing through all plants; it can be seen when you subtract the plant, it can best be compared to the color of a peach blossom and can also be seen in humans, only - clouded by Kama.

The next super-physical consciousness extends to all sensations, to pain and feelings. The clairvoyant learns to see them when he can see the astral body – and also the lower mental world.

The highest spiritual state of consciousness provides insight into the higher mental world and extends to the planets.

Thus, all further development is based on seven states of consciousness.

Each state of consciousness has seven life stages to go through. These are also called the seven kingdoms. They are: the first, the second, the third elementary kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

The physical body has already passed through the seven stages, the astral body will only penetrate them in the next round.

The passage through a realm is called a round.

Each state of life must again pass through seven states of form.

Between each state of life and the next there is another small pralaya.

The form states are designated as arupa (the actually still formless, only striving for development), rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, archetypal. The seventh state is the result of the six preceding ones; after the chela has been able to form himself plastically and intellectually, he creates, as it were, the skeleton to which the following can attach themselves, which in turn has to shoot out of the germ. It is the archetype.

Beyond the spiritual state of consciousness is the mastery; the spiritual state of consciousness is the highest that the chela can reach, in which he can see over all the others. After that, the mastery begins for him.

Our present physical state would shine for the clairvoyant in a color that most resembles a beautiful green; the astral state in a bright yellow; the rupa-form state in orange; the arupa-form state in rose red. The color tones of the future phases are blue, indigo, violet.

In the esoteric language, the preceding planets are called the “moon” and the sun.

The state of consciousness that man reached on the moon gave a result, as did the previous one; the first state of consciousness gave the deepest result.

The mystic finds within himself what he saw spread around him; what is now our inner life was once all around us; what our life with the world is now will later be our inner life; we have to assimilate everything. Our entire outer nature will fade away, but it will become inner life. What is spread out is called evolution, what is gathered together is called 'involution.

Thus, the mystic will find the earlier stages of expansion within himself when he delves into himself. The result of these earlier stages is ego-consciousness; the earth has the task of developing this ego-consciousness - Ahamkara the Indian calls it.

The ability to perceive is linked to the third state of consciousness, that of dream sleep; the mystic experiences it again, swimming directly in the stream of life, and he experiences it to an increased degree, since he transfers his present day consciousness to that state. The Indian calls this state Chita, the mystic language calls it “the waters, the sea of life”; Suso, Ruysbroek, Böhme - speak of a “merging in the heavenly tincture,” of a “tasting of life” - through direct insight into earlier states, which are found again in the depths of consciousness. It is a wandering back in time, not in space.

If you go back even further, you will find a state of consciousness that is only known to the chela who has maintained the continuity of consciousness even through sleep. The laws of nature are the only thing you can grasp from this state of consciousness. Today they are present in the rudimentary manas; manas is what is left of it. The chela perceives thoughts in a state of deep sleep – devachan. This state is created by raising the dreamless sleep to consciousness. The Indian calls it

The last state of consciousness, in which everything that can be seen in the rounds and planetary development is experienced, is deification or union with God, in fact: union with the primal creative power of a cosmos. “Mokscha” is what the Indian calls it. The chela only reaches it immediately before adeptness. What flashes up in man is not only the perception of thoughts, but also of the ‘I’. It is a merging with humanity; it is the realization: Budhi. That teaching, which has flowed out of the conscious seeing of Budhi, is therefore called ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.

We have thus become acquainted with the states of consciousness just described under the names: Ahamkara, Chita, Jujuksha or Manas, Mokscha or Budhi.

Through Ahamkara, man becomes aware of himself.

Through Chita, he becomes aware of the expressions of the beings around him.

Through manas, he becomes aware of the inner life of beings.

Through budhi, of the essence of the beings around him.

This continuous thread of development, which takes the states of consciousness through 343 stages, we call the Pitri.

To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. And in particular, when a subject is discussed, such as the one that has been chosen for this evening, the immortality of the soul, then very powerful voices immediately rise up from the more scientifically educated circles of our time, who believe that such things cannot be discussed at all from the point of view of knowledge, because these things must be left to the beliefs, the revelations of human feeling, which is not based on direct knowledge, and because in relation to them man has insurmountable limits to his knowledge.

Now, however, anthroposophy assumes that it can speak about precisely such things of life in the same way that today, with strict methods and with a discipline that is aware of its responsibility, it speaks from the point of view of the natural sciences. It is only a question of anthroposophy having to address itself to forces of knowledge which are certainly present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but which are present only for the starting points of their development, not for the further steps. And these further steps must be taken in order to penetrate the spiritual realms of life precisely from the point of view of real knowledge, not from that of nebulous mysticism. The starting point must be what I would call a union of intellectual modesty on the one hand and absolute trust in the perfection of the human powers of cognition on the other. By seeking to unite these two soul impulses, anthroposophy is able to explore the so-called supersensible realm with the same certainty as the senses and the natural sciences are used today to penetrate the realm of the sense world, of physical existence, with such great success and certainty.

What should be called intellectual modesty in this context? We know that within our soul life we have started from the childlike state of soul. We can very well compare this childlike state of soul with dreaming, even in a certain respect with sleep. And just as we awaken every morning from ordinary sleep, so we have awakened from our childlike state of soul to that which is our capacity for knowledge for science and for the purposes of practical life. If we now take the standpoint of intellectual modesty, we say to ourselves: Those powers which you had then as a small child, you have perfected through education and through the influence of life and your surroundings, and you have developed to that point of view from which you today gain your knowledge and your impulses for human life. This is not said with full intensity without intellectual modesty. Rather, one says: From the point of view that I have once acquired, I must be able to say yes and no to all sorts of things, if only I apply the correct methods that are common today. I must also be able to decide what is recognizable and what is to be relegated to the realm of mere belief. -- Anthroposophy counters this by asserting that it is perhaps possible to go beyond the powers of the soul that one has acquired as an adult, just as one can go beyond the cognitive abilities of the dreamy soul of a small child. Of course, it depends entirely on whether such a progression really succeeds, and I would like to speak to you this evening about this progression with reference to the field of soul immortality.

On the other hand, however, anthroposophy has full and intense confidence that the powers of cognition attained by each person can be perfected more and more. Thus it ventures on such a path of perfection, and it begins by saying something like the following: Today we have achieved a certain concept of knowledge through the great successes of the natural sciences. But has this concept of knowledge really been taken out of the full depths of life? It is certainly justified for everything that we strive for in its field. But is it taken out of the full depths of life by considering precisely those questions of human existence that are connected firstly with the deepest longings of human life, secondly with everything that man calls the consciousness of his human dignity, thirdly with everything from which he derives the actual meaning of life: the moral impulses?

All this nevertheless leads us to take certain borderline areas and borderline phenomena of life into consideration when it comes to gaining insights into precisely these most intimate needs and questions, especially those of the soul's existence.

Not in order to say anything valid for knowledge from the outset, but to gain a comparative starting point, let me point out something that presents itself as a dark area and yet as an area that challenges many riddles in life. It is the area that man knows well, the area of dreaming as man experiences it while asleep. I would like to emphasize this explicitly: Nothing is to be made out for knowledge by my mentioning dreams and sleep, but only a starting point is to be gained for our present understanding. Let us imagine in front of our soul these manifold and colorful worlds of images that dreams conjure up for us. We can be sure that they come from the same depths of human life from which our 'daytime imaginings usually emerge. But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. Couldn't life nevertheless proceed in the same way as it does today? We could be driven by certain forces of nature or spiritual powers, without having an awake consciousness, to our daily work and - even if it may seem reprehensible to some listeners - perhaps even to scientific activity; we could carry out this activity, as it were, sleepwalking. Within ourselves, however, nothing could take place except that which we know as the dream world; the outer world would then be completely different from that which we have in our inner consciousness.

If you think about it properly, you come to say to yourself: This world of dreams, we never know it when we are in it ourselves. We would regard the dream world as our reality, which we would dream from the beginning to the end of our lives in the manner described above. That we recognize the subordinate reality value of the dream depends on the fact that we go through the life-jolt from sleep to awakening, that we become conscious of it - I am not speaking now in philosophical consideration, but from the standpoint of popular consciousness - through this life-jolt. Through it we switch that which is our human nature, namely that which is of a volitional nature, into our physical body. Anyone who observes closely also knows that everything that is conveyed to us through the senses in waking life is based entirely on the unfolding of real life in the physical body during waking. Through this involvement of our will in the physical body we arrive at the point of view from which we distinguish the subordinate reality value of dreaming from that reality value which the sense world has for our awakening consciousness. We now know that we are in contact with an external reality through the will inserted into our body. Again, I do not want to speak about this in philosophical considerations, but entirely from the standpoint of popular consciousness.

Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness.

In order to bring about a second awakening, anthroposophy turns first of all to soul forces as they are present in ordinary life, but which already indicate through their ordinary nature that they are capable of development. Now even philosophers admit that what we call human memory points to a more spiritual nature of the human soul; that we cannot treat memory in the same way as we treat those soul faculties which are directly bound to the impressions of the outer sense world. Again, let us not adhere to philosophical considerations, but, as we do in ordinary consciousness, to that which plays a role as memory in man. Through memory we can call up images of experiences we went through many years ago. Depending on our disposition, these images may be more vivid or more shadowy, but they are there before us. When we indulge in ordinary sensory observation, that which we imagine must be present; that which memory gives is not present, it may be long gone. Through our imaginative power we conjure up, as it were, from our own inner being something before our soul which was once there, but which is no longer there, which cannot have a present existence. In this way we gain the insight that we are able to drive out of the human inner being forces of cognition which imagine something that does not exist in the present. And the question arises: Can perhaps through a certain further development of the powers of the soul, as we have developed them since our first childhood, that which underlies our power of memory be further developed? Can it be developed in such a way that we not only imagine what is not there at present but was once there during our life on earth, but that we imagine something that is not there at all? Then we would make the leap of life into a higher reality, into a reality from which ordinary earthly life would appear as the dreaming life does to the waking consciousness.

Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. It addresses itself to the human powers of thought. After all, they are the ones who conjure up in our imagination what we have once experienced. And anthroposophical research proceeds in such a way that it does something with thought that is not actually done with thought in the present age. Today's thinking is - and rightly so from certain points of view - more oriented towards surrendering to the outside world. To allow the impressions of the external world to act first on the senses, to process them by counting, measuring, weighing, to combine them with thinking, is passive thinking, a thinking that man considers all the more secure with regard to knowledge, the more passive it is, the more it surrenders to what the external senses and organs say. Indeed, in order not to gain a fantastic knowledge as some philosophers do, anthroposophy turns to thinking in such a way that it seeks to develop this thinking further than it is in ordinary life. To this end, easily comprehensible ideas, which at first are not even considered in terms of what they mean, are placed at the center of ordinary consciousness and the whole life of the soul is concentrated on such ideas. The life of the soul is completely withdrawn from external impressions and external life by seeking more and more to make this life of the soul stronger and stronger on one or a series of manageable ideas. The result is something that lasts shorter for one person and longer for another, depending on their soul disposition. One person needs three months, another many years. If you repeat these exercises in rhythmic succession, after a while you will notice something in your soul life that I would like to compare with something in your outer life: If you strain a muscle again and again, it strengthens and becomes strong. In the same way, one feels the soul's imaginative faculty strengthening by always concentrating on an easily comprehensible idea; and finally one feels how the whole thinking becomes active, how real life, inner life in the true sense, moves into this thinking. One gradually feels the great difference, which is not only a figurative but a real one, between dead and abstract thinking and that towards which we strive and which we want to absorb into an inner life in the thinking element.

I said that one must start from a manageable idea. In what I am going to tell you today about the exercises of the life of the soul, it is a question of following each step with full human prudence, as otherwise only the mathematician follows his steps, or the geometer, who is aware, when he brings one out of the other, how figure follows figure, how number follows number. This consciousness, which the anthroposophical researcher feels like the strict mathematician: to be accountable as a researcher - this consciousness must prevail.

Of course, all self-suggestions, everything somehow subjective must be excluded. But this can never be ruled out if we take up arbitrary ideas from our mental life; they have many echoes of life in them, they often suggest something to us. But if we put together ideas that perhaps have no external meaning for us at all, such as “light - wisdom” - and concentrate again and again on such an idea, whose reality value remains indifferent to us, with the whole life of our soul, then the thinking ability in us strengthens. In this way we come to know - as I said, for one person it takes less time, for another it takes longer - what this means: life in thinking; for a kind of detachment of a higher person from the person we know lives in our physical body does indeed gradually take place. Just as we become aware in our physical body that it is something living when we move our legs, move our hands, so we become aware through such an exercise: It is something real, living, real, life-real, when I move in the strengthened thinking.

One could roughly say: We finally come to experience a higher person in us through these power phenomena, through which one gropes spiritually, as one otherwise gropes physically with one's fingers. In this way we gradually experience how a higher man, who is experienced in this thinking, is torn away from the physical man; and we have arrived at the supersensible experience, at the experience of the supersensible man, in so far as he passes through earthly life between birth and death. By the fact that one has risen to observation in the inner ability to think, one comes to the fact that one overcomes space through this ability to think, overcomes the present in general and comes to an experience in time. Yes, one feels that which one experiences as the second, detached human being, not actually as a spatial human being. This is the physical human being. One finds that one experiences the second in this way as a human being fluctuating only in time. And that which one experiences there is structured into a kind of tableau which, in a relatively short time, allows one to survey life on earth from earliest childhood to the point in time one has just reached.

There is a big difference between the two things: the life tableau and my memories. You could say: I can also put together this earthly life from my memories. I can put together from my memory what I experienced a short or long time ago. And if I make the effort and if I take my time, then I will have an overall memory of my life on earth. And it could be that I am deceiving myself that in such an examination I have something in my life tableau, which is manageable in a short time, which with the help of subconscious soul forces would bring something similar to a conscious memory picture before my mind. - But one gradually realizes that there is a great difference between what one puts together in one's memory and such a tableau of the soul's life, which stands before the soul as a first supersensible knowledge, initially as a self-knowledge. For when you compile your experiences as a memory picture, you actually always see in front of you what has had an effect on you from the outside. You see people, natural events, the external things that are of interest to you.

This life tableau is completely different. There you have much less of an eye on what has come to you from the outside, so to speak, and more of an eye on what has worked from within. If I have gotten to know a person in life, I remember much less through this life tableau how he or she came across to me, but rather what longings were aroused in my own breast in order to find something special about this person. If I have any natural phenomenon in this life tableau, it is not so much the interesting aspects of the natural phenomenon that make themselves felt, but those impulses from my own human life that follow this natural phenomenon with particular sympathy or antipathy. That which stands before my soul in this tableau is myself, how I have behaved in relation to what I have gone through. One could say, if one wants to draw rough comparisons: This memory tableau that I have described, which can only be obtained after such an examination, is as different from an ordinary memory tableau brought about by memory as the impression in the seal is from the impression in the sealing wax. It is like the negative image to the positive image of that which we can put together through the ordinary memory image.

Thus, when we have gone through the first stage of spiritual practice, we have come to a true self-knowledge of our earthly life. For such self-knowledge is there. There are always nuances mixed in. In this memory tableau you see what has brought you forward; then you say to yourself: “There is something that has made you imperfect, that has brought you back. -- One places oneself in this tableau of memory with human worth and human dignity, and through the realization that is first awakened one attains an idea of that which one is actually only now entitled to call the “ether” of the world in relation to external reality and the sensual forces. The ether of the world, which lives only in the temporal and which to a certain extent gives us a piece of what I have now described as the first form of the higher human being detached from the physical.

But one has not been long enough with this first step. If you want more, you must undertake to continue these exercises of the soul. The next soul exercises consist in using a strongly activated inner will to remove the ideas from the consciousness, just as one has used one's will to place such ideas into the consciousness to strengthen the being and to concentrate on them. As I said, there must be complete prudence, as with the mathematician. For it must be said: We are in a certain way taken in with our whole soul-life by the conception which soon moves into the center of consciousness. And especially when thinking has already become so vivid that we have only this idea itself in consciousness, and that not only such ideas are there, but that our own inner experience appears as in powerful pictures in the tableau described - then we are strongly taken in by what we have before the soul in such a picture heightened to vividness. A greater power is necessary to remove such images from the consciousness than is necessary to remove ordinary images from the consciousness. One knows, by the way, what it means to remove ordinary ideas from the consciousness. Try to admit this to yourself honestly.

When the senses are silent, moreover when the sensually perceived is silent, when the combination of thoughts is silent and the ideas and sensations are, as it were, removed from the consciousness, then man falls asleep. If there is no stimulation from the imagination, he does not have the strength to maintain the waking state. But if one has that strength of soul which is necessary for what I have described, then one also has the strength to take away the acquired ideas which come into us in this way through an inner strengthened life, to keep the whole consciousness empty of imagination and yet to remain awake. Just being awake, imagining nothing, that is what must be striven for as a second state: A waking consciousness empty of content! But this contentless waking consciousness, one can become aware of it inwardly, but it does not remain so for long. Once it has been established, however, the second stage of spiritual cognition occurs. Then one not only becomes aware of what has just been described, which lives in the human being, then the spiritual content of our world environment forces its way into this waking, content-free consciousness, into this empty consciousness. And the second human being, who has first detached himself from the physical, corporeal human being, who was conscious of himself in the course of his entire life on earth, will now not only be conscious of himself, but through this higher self-consciousness he will absorb a spiritual world of his surroundings. Again something appears before our soul which seems strange and foreign to the present man, but which is nevertheless contained in what I have called the second stage of man's spiritual knowledge, inspiration. An exact inspiration occurs there; just as everything I have described here must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance in a nebulous mysticism. If one wishes to use this expression, one may only speak of an exact voyance, which is only based on the development of the soul forces, like mathematical thinking, which has no external reality in itself, but only one that is formed internally, and to which only mathematical thinking must be added when it extends to the sensory world, as in measuring, counting, weighing and so on.

To this, what one has conceived in an inwardly living thinking, which is modeled on the particular mathematical thinking, must be added what I have described to you here. And through this spiritual work one arrives at knowledge in the same way that we arrive at knowledge through measuring, counting and weighing. And that which occurs is a state of soul life which is not known in ordinary consciousness because it is not necessary. I would like to make clear what state of soul life occurs when awake, empty consciousness is reached.

First we think of ourselves in a modern metropolis, with all its noise, its din; we ourselves do not come to rest, we ourselves are absorbed in this noise, in this din. Then we move away from this cosmopolitan city - the din, the noise become quieter and quieter; if we move further away, even quieter. We imagine ourselves in the solitude of the forest. There is a silence that we can describe as zero in relation to the noise of the city. Silence around us, silence within us. But now something else can occur, although it is not observed in ordinary life. We have to use a second comparison. As you know, if someone has a certain amount of wealth, this wealth can be spent little by little; he owns less and less. If he earns nothing extra, if he continues to spend, then he is down to zero. If he has nothing at all and continues to spend, he is in debt; then he has less than zero. Mathematicians call this negative values, minus. Now imagine that: We have descended from the loud roar, the noise of the big city to silence zero and descend further, and it becomes quieter and quieter than silence and silence zero, so that we have less around us than mere silence, that it is quieter, quieter than quiet. This is the state of soul that gradually occurs when we pass through the empty but still awake consciousness. Little by little we feel quite clearly what I would like to call the deep silence of the human soul. This deep silence is not just silence, it is more or less, as you like, than silence. In terms of tranquillity, it goes below tranquillity zero. But then, when this deep silence of the soul is really experienced, everything that is of spiritual essence around us emerges from this deep silence of the soul. And the full inspiration occurs.

Then we are put into the position, when we have experienced this deep silence of the soul, to actually also now hear spiritually that what lives in the spiritual world. And the ordinary sensory world becomes a means for us to hint at what lives in this spiritual world. I would like to speak quite concretely of real spiritual knowledge. Something sounds out of the deep silence of the soul that makes an impression on me: it excites me, it strikes me with a certain liveliness. I say it is something that makes an impression on me, just as the yellow color of a lively soul life makes an impression on me. Then I have something in the sensory world through which I can express what I have experienced in the spiritual world. I describe this knowledge by saying: It has an effect on me like the yellow color of the sense world, or like the tone C or C sharp, like warmth or cold. In short, that which I have experienced in the sense world becomes for me a material, just as what appears to me in the spiritual world can be described in ordinary words. The whole sense world becomes something like a language to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. This is not understood by those who want to make progress too quickly and therefore stop at superficial judgment. The investigator encounters an experience that makes the same impression on him as the sensual color, and therefore he describes what he experiences spiritually through colors, sounds and so on. Just as one should not confuse the word “table” with the real table, so now one should not confuse it with that by which it is described, the spiritual world itself, which sprouts from the deep silence.

Once one has reached this point of view, one comes to extinguish this whole tableau of life, which one first conjured up, within oneself; not only to evoke empty consciousness towards individual ideas, but towards the whole earthly life of man, and indeed precisely in his inner form. One then, so to speak, extinguishes oneself as an earthly human being. But by now having the possibility to experience the deep silence of the human soul after the extinction of the earthly self, which is bound to the physical body of man, one now experiences that which one has become as a spiritual-soul man before one has descended from the spiritual world and has clothed the physical body around oneself. Out of the deep silence of the soul one experiences the spiritual-soul that one was in the pre-earthly existence. And just as one arrived at one's physical surroundings in the physical body, so, by placing oneself in that which one was in the spiritual-soul world, one arrives at recognizing how one was in the pre-earthly existence in the surroundings of spiritual-soul beings, even as a soul-spiritual being, as a similar being. One enters fully into that spiritual world from which one has descended to earthly existence.

You can realize that in ordinary life the eternity of the human soul is only explored in one direction, the immortality of the soul. But this immortality of the soul has another side, for which the older language still had a word, but no longer the modern language. This soul immortality has not only one side, that of immortality, but also that of unbornness, and it is only from unbornness and immortality that the full soul immortality is composed. Thus one does not arrive through metaphysical speculation, but by awakening the soul itself, and out of the deep silence of the soul to that which is eternal in the human soul, was eternal and was spiritually present before man descended to earthly existence, and remains eternal by dwelling in the physical human body between birth and death.

But we can only approach the eternal character step by step, also through anthroposophical spiritual research. As the third stage I must mention something that may cause a slight shudder, perhaps an inner mockery, especially for those who are sitting here with the usual scientific ideas. I can understand this very well, as I can understand all opposing objections to anthroposophy. Something that we already have in ordinary life can be further developed into a higher power of cognition, like the powers of a child into what we have developed in our adult state, and that is the power of love. Loving is something quite different when it is bound to the human body, when it surrenders to the passions that live themselves out in loving, than when, as I have described, after the physical ego, even the earthly ego from birth to death, has been stripped away, when the human being lives himself out of the physical existence into the state in which he faces the purely spiritual. When he thereby develops the powers of love, of complete surrender, then that which he has experienced in the pre-earthly state, which he now fully realizes, is transformed into knowledge. He experiences what it means to experience full consciousness with reality outside his physical body. And when he experiences this surrender to spiritual experience in this way, then his ego is returned to him in a new way. The ego, which in earthly life lives in selfishness and egotism, which is overcome by acquiring such self-knowledge as is acquired when this ego is twice extinguished, thus develops full love on a soul-spiritual level, and something then confronts you which at first appears to you like a complete stranger, like a completely alien personality. If you strive for this, it will happen in the least. One should strive for the love I have described. Then, because one can go completely out of oneself, one is confronted by what one is oneself, but like a foreign personality, and one only then realizes what this self was like in the past life on earth, which one went through before one came to this life on earth; one only then realizes how the ego was present in the earlier stage of existence on earth, when one is able to feel like a second person through increased, strengthened love. One looks back to a certain point in the development of time where the ego as ego had a beginning, where the repeated earth lives had a beginning. But we cannot speak of that now. We can only speak of the fact that we can look back on a series of earth lives, which are passed through to full human life, between which there are always lives in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence between death and a new earthly birth.

This is the one thing one experiences of the eternal and immortal character of the soul when one has made up one's mind to the recognizing view. The other thing, however, which one acquires through the love that has increased to knowledge, is to be able to experience the higher human being outside of his physical body. That which one acquires further is that one sees how this being is without a body, and the realization of how the body becomes a corpse in death, how this body falls away, how the human being enters the after-earthly life. Just as one has a view of the pre-earthly life, of the unborn, one now has a view into immortality, into the after-earthly life. The moral impulses one has acquired as an earthly human being, which one carries through the gate of death, and how one prepares a new earthly existence together with the spiritual world in order to descend to earth as an earthly human being, this now appears before the soul in vivid vividness, which is based on intellectual modesty, but also on a certain trust in the powers of the human soul.

This leads knowledge to that area of life which is so close to the longings and needs of man. We look at those whom we have loved in life, who are close to us through blood ties or soul ties; we look at the gate of death and ask: What will become of the ties that the blood has spun and of the ties that the soul and spirit have woven when a person has passed through the gate of death? If one has this insight, one knows how the outer physical shell of the physical body falls away from what man is as an eternal being, how man rises into the spiritual world with those laws and lives there with the forces which he has already brought down and with which he has lived in his physical life on earth. We then experience how that which we have in common with other people as blood ties, as bonds of friendship, as bonds of love, falls away from our communities just as the physical body of man itself falls away; and we know from the realization that we meet again the souls with whom a bond has connected us, in pure communion of the spiritual world, because the physical obstacles are no longer there. That what men do not demand to know out of a curious instinct, that what was human dignity, the fate of the souls, that becomes in this way a real knowledge.

And still other things become a real knowledge. The reality of the outer physical world eludes the dream because the will is not involved in the physical body. In dreams man takes the world of images for reality; thus we take much for reality before we awaken in the manner described to the deep silence of the soul, to the spiritual life. When we wake up to the waking spiritual life, after we have gone through the second life-jolt and the physical reality experienced awake appears to us as mere dreaming, then many things that were reality to us in the physical-bodily life appear to us in the higher sense, in the sense of the physical-spiritual life, as a dream. Just as the dream reality is captured by the physically tangible reality, so that which we experience in physical life as moral or religious people is now captured by that to which we awaken through the second life pressure. And we become aware of what was actually meant by people like Knebel, Goethe's friend, who said as an old man: “When one has grown old, one finds that in the face of the decisive events of existence everything seems as if it had been prepared long ago. Everything seems to have been planned by man himself, which has had a profound influence on him as a man or as a youth. And all his steps as a youth seem to point to this experience. - This idea continues to develop and becomes true in the process of formation. If one penetrates this idea further with the knowledge that one gains in the way described, one sees that this is indeed the case in life. One experiences something quite decisive. One is led to a person with whom the further course of life is to be walked together. You look at the steps that have led you to this person. They come from the longing to experience precisely what you can experience with this person until you reach the goal that corresponds to a longing of the soul, a test of the soul in the right way. That which lives in man, through which he conjures up his destiny as if out of himself, must be connected to the view of the earthly lives lived through, in which one was a morally such and such a person, did this and that. And one sees that what one does now seems instinctive in this life, like chance; it is fatefully linked to what one was in the previous earthly life.

This seems to be a devastating thought. But just as little as the fact that we have blond or black hair, blue or brown eyes, lean or full hands affects our freedom, dignity and full responsibility as human beings, so little does it affect what we are as free, responsible human beings when we know that it is the soul that configures us, that as free human beings we have to carve out our life's destiny on a fated basis. But life becomes comprehensible when man learns to look at it, imbued with this idea of destiny, which is quite compatible with freedom, that he does not stand in life in such a way that every moment is like chance to him, but that he feels himself placed in the world of natural necessity, as in the world of a real spirituality, in which he stands as a higher man with his moral, fateful powers. In this way, such knowledge leads man from outer life to the immortality of the soul.

One can still object: Yes, individual spiritual researchers can indeed recognize this, but what does it mean for the ordinary person? - It means just as much as an artistically painted picture to someone who has not become a painter. It would be sad if you had to be a painter to understand a work of art. You only need a certain healthy feeling to experience the artistic, and only healthy human judgment to experience what the spiritual researcher describes. Only if one throws the unfortunately so numerous prejudices in one's own way, then one places oneself before the pictures which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher sketches, as one places oneself before a picture in which, instead of seeing a world, one sees nothing but splashes of color placed side by side. This world is also fully comprehensible to those who live a simple, ordinary life from the description of the anthroposophical spiritual researcher, although he is always able to understand it through books such as “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? “ he is always able to go so far on the path of spiritual research without influencing his outer life that he can check what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher tells him, that he can check whether this anthroposophical spiritual researcher is speaking out of fantasy or whether his view is something that has been firmly acquired, just as mathematical judgments, measuring, counting, weighing and so on are themselves firmly acquired.

This is what spiritual science wishes to introduce into the present spiritual life of mankind. It is that which it must believe corresponds to the numerous innermost needs of the soul. For it is so that today many people instinctively, unconsciously, precisely through what one has become through education, out of the natural scientific prerequisites, gain the longing to know something in a similar way, encompassing the experiences, about that which is so close to the soul and of which I have only spoken today as an example of the immortality of the soul and that which is connected with immortality.

But of course this puts something into the world that is like the Copernican world view compared to the one we were used to at that time. But it is so that what appears to be a human “folly” gradually becomes a matter of course. The Copernican world view even had to wait a very long time before it became self-evident. Anthroposophy can wait. But it must say, out of an obligation to culture and civilization, that it is fully understandable to it when ordinary natural science, which considers itself sovereign with its means, has arrived at a doctrine of the soul without a soul through an ordinary pursuit of the life of the soul with the external means of calculating, counting, weighing, and that it finds an ideal in it. Anthroposophy, however, would like to add to that which it does not deny the justification of on the one hand, to a doctrine gained from natural science, through developed full comprehension of the innermost essence of the human soul, what is soul-spiritual in man as eternal life, what is soul-spiritual in the whole world, in the whole cosmos as eternal life, so that man can recognize himself as eternal, intimately connected with the eternal in the cosmos, as immortal in the cosmos. Anthroposophy therefore wishes to give knowledge of the present human life and the human life of the near future, so that it meets a necessity of the time by adding to the present teaching of the soul without soul a teaching of the soul awakened vividly out of the human soul, which then follows from such a teaching again a teaching of the world permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. And this will be needed more and more.

Here, where my hopes and dreams found peace, let me name this house ‘Wahnfried’ [hopes and dreams at peace].¹⁹⁵

These are the words Richard Wagner wrote for the house he had built in Bayreuth. The house brought fulfilment of a deep longing. To him, all of life had been endeavour, hopes and dreams. Peace came to his hopes and dreams with his occultist dramatic work Parsifal.

People generally believe that when a work of art such as Wagner's Parsifal is produced, all the thoughts that may be found in it have been deliberately put in by the artist. That, however, is not the way a mystic will ever consider a work he has created. A plant also does not know the laws which the botanist discovers when he studies it. Invisible powers were hovering above Richard Wagner. The occult contents of Parsifal come from them. Much of the process we call ‘occult training’ lived in Wagner. Wonderful things may be discovered by following the development of someone throughout his life. You can observe truths dawning in his mind that were systematically nurtured in occult centres for centuries.

Let us consider the way in which the secrets that later came instinctively to Wagner were presented to the pupils at occult centres. All kinds of physical and mental exercises were done and this intimately shaped their faculty of occult vision. The teacher would above all awaken a basic mood in the student that would give him an intimate relationship to the natural world that surrounded him. The pupil would be guided through the realms of nature and taught to approach nature inwardly in the same way we approach human beings. Seeing a smile we surmise a cheerful mood of soul, tears are to us another specific inner response. The pupil would be shown how to perceive correspondences between physiognomy and soul life also in the natural world. An occultist is someone for whom these things become very real in his inner life. Looking at the natural world, the pupil would be told: ‘All is physiognomy, reflecting something that is of the spirit.’ A plant in brilliant colours would be the smiling mien of the earth spirit to him, another the sorrowful mien of the earth spirit. An occultist thus takes emotional impressions with him through all parts of the world.

A crystal chastely lets light pass through itself. Here matter is free from desire and longings. Human substance is more perfect, but it is full of pleasure and pain, desire and passion. The day will come when human substance will be as chaste and precious as that of a crystal. The pupil's heart and mind would be attuned to finding images in looking at the world of nature, showing how the flesh would develop at a future time. Objects in the outside world are seen as expressions of the world's soul by the occultist, and this is just as objective as the spatial forms a mathematician is able to visualize. And just as it is impossible for two mathematicians to teach different things about a theorem, so it is impossible for two individuals who have gained access to higher knowledge to have different inner responses. Mystical things are beyond dispute, just as mathematical concepts are.

When a pupil had practised like this and was then found ready for it, another idea would be presented to him. He was introduced to something that was the most beautiful and most pure and yet also the most questionable. He would be told: ‘Look at the plant. The chalice of its corolla faces the sun. The sunbeam influences its growth and maintains it. It presents its reproductive organs to the sun in a chaste way. These parts, kept hidden in shame by man and animal, are chastely turned towards the sun in the plant. Now look back into the far distant past. Then man, too, was at the stage at which the plant has remained. Then he, too, had his reproductive organ facing the sun. The head, the root, was in the soil. Mystics have always known that man is an inverted plant. Only he developed further in the course of evolution, first becoming horizontal, like the animal, and then assuming the upright form human beings have today. He went through the plant realm and the animal realm to reach the human realm. Plato referred to this when he said that the world's soul has been crucified on the world's body.’ Man has not yet come to the end of his evolution, however. He is in a transitional stage where he must overcome desire and reach a higher spirituality. Desire must be overcome in the part he turns away from the sun, winning through to a higher spirituality. Then man will offer the chalice of his essential nature to the higher spiritual sun as purely and chastely as the plant does.

This ideal of the plant's chalice made spiritual was presented to those who were pupils of the Holy Grail. They were told that the holy chalice was the plant corolla which had gone through the sphere of animal life and had then been purified again and made spiritual. The words spoken to the pupil were: ‘The potential for this chalice, which takes the rays of the spiritual sun into itself; also lies in the human being. Man has finished organs and others that will only develop in future. In the far distant future man will reproduce himself the way we create a wave in the air when we say a word today.’ When the pupil had made these feelings his own, he was able to feel in those occult fastnesses how the power that sprouts forth from the plants at the time of Good Friday and Easter will in future also show itself in man, having been cleansed and purified. This sprouting growth was experienced especially on Good Friday, and people also felt that a pledge had been given with Christ's sacrificial death that man might have the possibility of gaining possession of the Holy Grail through his struggles. The sap that is the blood of Christ makes man pure, just as the plant has pure sap flowing through it. This was something the pupils experienced at the most solemn moments. The thought of redemption arose clearly before them when they had their inner experience of the relationship between Christ's sacrificial death and the sprouting plant. This idea came to be ever present for Richard Wagner. Wagner used the figure of Alberich to represent the birth of the I and of egotism. He used the E flat organ pedal for this.¹⁹⁶

In 1856 he tried to give form to the riddle of life on earth in a play called The Victors. A youth was loved by a girl belonging to the lowest caste in India. The difference in their castes made him turn away from the girl and become a pupil of Buddha. The pain this gave to the girl was so great that she realized that she had been a Brahman in an earlier life who had refused the hand of a low-caste girl. This is how Wagner was searching for a way of helping people to understand cosmic thought.

In 1857 Richard Wagner was standing outside the Villa Wesendonk near Zurich and looking out upon the Lake of Zurich and the countryside. Seeing the sprouting plants he came to see the relationship between redemption and plant life. A basic feeling for the ideal of the chalice came to him, an ideal the followers of the grail had always known. Later he tried to find the music that would express the evolution that leads from plant chalice to grail chalice. And he then found peace in his hopes and dreams.

The Parsifal idea has always been part of more recent culture, lying hidden in it as a seed. In his poem The Secrets, Goethe wrote of a youth walking through the woods to a monastery where he was received into the community of initiates. This youth seems like a Parsifal on his way to the grail castle. Asked about the poem by a group of students, Goethe explained that there are many different religious views in the world. Each of the twelve men whom Brother Mark found in the monastery was the representative of one of them, and the thirteenth among them was their leader.

Goethe was representing the occult lodge in his poem where there are no disputes over different opinions but only love. On reaching the monastery the young man saw a cross above the entrance with roses wound around it. He asked: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ The sign of the rose cross expresses a thought that is part of the whole of world evolution. Someone who understands the ideal and the symbol is able to find it everywhere. Ancient legend tells of Cain looking for the door to paradise.¹⁹⁷ He was not admitted, but Seth was. Seth found the tree of knowledge and the tree of life intertwined. He took three seeds and put them on the dying Adam's tongue. A tree grew from them. That was the tree which Moses saw in flames, hearing the words: ‘I am he who was, who is and ever shall be.’¹⁹⁸ Moses got his staff from this tree. The great door to Solomon's temple was made of its wood, also the bridge which the Christ crossed on his way to the Mount of Olives, and finally the Cross on Golgotha. Those who knew of the grail had added: When the wood had grown dry and become the cross, it produced living shoots as a pledge of life eternal. The grail pupil would see this in the form of roses. Here past and future come together. Goethe touched on this secret in verses such as:

Tell none but the wise,
For the crowd will cast instant derision.

This is also the mood behind the words: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ Wagner brought this stage of evolution most intensely to expression in his Parsifal. Everything Parsifal does has meaning. Nothing he does is superficial. He is allowed to be active in the supersensible world and does most at the point where he reaches the greatest pinnacle of his inner development.

This can be heard so marvellously in Wagner's last work. When we see the group of holy people gathered around the grail, and Parsifal who first of all kills—he shoots the swan—and then becomes the redeemer, we understand what Wagner meant with the words: ‘hopes and dreams found peace’. He had wanted to show that it was possible to reach in the musical sphere what it had not been possible to show by means of drama. Until then, music had only given expression to inner feelings. On the other hand people felt it was importunate to use the term ‘drama’. Deepest inner feelings begin where words cease to be. Wagner was looking for a link in musical drama. The spoken word was to stop at the given moment, leaving the stage to music. Without Parsifal, Wagner would not have achieved the ideal he strove for. At the point where he penetrated to the highest level in the supersensible sphere, he needed the most intimate musical element. He found the purest musical expression for this in his Parsifal. As an artist and musician he sought to show what lived in Wagner the mystic.

• 195. See Kleeberg L. Wege und Worte. Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner aus Tagebüchern und Briefen. 2. Aufl. S. 134 ff. Stuttgart 1961.
• 196. In the Rheingold prelude.
• 197. See Steiner R. The Temple Legend (GA 93). 20 lectures, Berlin 1904–1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985
• 198. Exodus 3: 1-5 & 14.

My dear Friends,

Every artistic activity has also its esoteric side. For the work that we carry on as artists has to receive its impulses from the spiritual world, and must therefore be rooted in the esoteric. If we forget this, if we forget that all genuine art springs from the spiritual world, then we must either resign ourselves to be guided by rules, or submit to an inartistic naturalism. To routine and mannerisms, or to a naturalism that is lacking in art—to one or the other we are condemned if we forget that what we create artistically has always, without exception, to receive its form from the formative activity of the spirit.

In the art of the stage it is important to remember that we are ourselves the instrument with which we have to work. We have accordingly to succeed in objectifying ourselves to the point where we can be such an instrument, so that we can play upon the organisation of our body as we would, for example, on some musical instrument. That, first of all. And then, standing as it were by the side of our own acting, we have also continually to be taking the most ardent and intense interest in every single word and action that we engage in on the stage.

It is of this twofold aim that I want to speak to you today. In striving to attain it, the actor will be developing a right feeling for his vocation; he will be drawing near to the esoteric—even to the esoteric that belongs to him as an actor.

For you must know, a grave danger lies in wait for the actor, threatens, in fact, more or less everyone who takes any part at all in the work of the stage. The danger is greatest, or has been so in the more decadent days of the art, for those actors who are favourites with the public; they are exposed to it most of all. I mean the danger of becoming so absorbed in the world of the stage as to lose connection with the real world outside. Again and again one makes the acquaintance of actors who have very little feeling or perception for what is happening in real life, who simply do not know the world. They have a thorough knowledge of this or that character in Shakespeare or in Goethe or Schiller. They know Wilhelm Tell, they know Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II. They know an extravagantly frivolous character out of some comedy or other. In effect they know the world in its reflection in drama, but they do not know real men and women. This state of things can often spread farther and begin to show itself in a section of the public. Do we not frequently have the experience that when we begin to speak of some catastrophe that has taken place, then if someone is present who has any sort of connection with the stage, sure as fate, he will begin at once to recall to us a similar calamity in some play? And a habit of this kind is not without its consequences; it has a distorting and degrading influence on public taste. How often, when we look for evidence of taste, do we find nothing to deserve the name, but instead a complete perversion of taste!

We had a most painful instance of this in the days when Gerhard Hauptmann's Weber was being played. Just think what all those sensitive and impressionable ladies, sitting there in their rustling silks and décolletage—just think what they had to witness as they watched the play through! Things they would certainly never have allowed to come anywhere near them in real life. A dead dog being devoured bit by bit! Had such a sight met their eyes in real life, they would have run from it as they would from a raging lion. But looking at it up there on the stage they enjoyed it, they were thrilled. Yes, it has come to that! Do not misunderstand me. I have no objection to the representation on the stage of a dead dog being devoured—provided the motif is artistically treated. What I deplore is the perversion of taste.

The danger that I want to bring home to you, the danger of becoming at last quite remote from real life and living only in the stage reflection of it, is there above all, as we said, for the actor. The actor is, however, also in a specially favourable position to cope with it. For the very art he is pursuing, once he comes to understand it in the way we have been putting it forward in these lectures, will rescue him from the danger. As soon as he begins to go beyond the exoteric in his work and activity on the stage and to enter into its esoteric aspect, he will be saved from the danger of drifting right away from real life and becoming absorbed in its stage reflection. And the actor will be entering into the esoteric side of his work when he has come to the point where the monologue or dialogue or whatever it may be that he has been practising flows of its own accord in a stream of speech-forming activity. Exercises to this end should be given to the students in a school of dramatic art. Please follow carefully what I am saying. By the time of the dress rehearsal, the actor should be absolutely ready with his part just like a wound-up clock—,the whole stream of well-formed speech running its course without his help; for by then his part should have become an independent being within him Better still, of course, if this is attained a good while before the dress rehearsal.

And now, having succeeded in coming so far, the actor has a possibility that will certainly not be his if in the moment of performance he is obliged still to be giving his attention to the content of his part, in the way one does when reading or listening, where it is the immediate prose content of the words that is vividly present to consciousness. Assuming, however, that the actor has by this time mastered the content, and moreover progressed so far with the forming of the speech that this flows on of itself, a new possibility opens before him. Having set himself free from the forming of the speech, he will be able—and here comes the important point—to devote himself to listening, undisturbed by any conscious forming of it, to the speaking he has created and which is now in full flow, he will be able to surrender himself to its influence, allowing it here and there to fill him with glowing enthusiasm or, at another time, to cause him pain. This is not of course possible until the speaking has, by long practice, been brought into flow in the way I explained; for only then can the actor regain his freedom and, without being disturbed in his soul by the process of creation, participate in the experience of what he has himself created—in the same way as he would in some experience that came to meet him from a fellow human being.

I want you to appreciate the importance of this achievement. The actor should be able to keep himself in reserve, to hold back and not allow himself to be caught in his own creation; and then, having once fully objectified his own creation, be able to experience it from without with all the elemental force of his emotions, letting it arouse in him joy and admiration, or again sorrow and distress.

At this point a certain feeling will begin to dawn in the actor, a feeling that is in reality a part of his own esoteric life and that will prove to be actually stronger with him than with persons who are not actors. The play, he will feel, together with my own part in it, begins now to interest me as something quite outside myself, so soon, that is, as I step on to the stage. For I must first be on the stage. I need the footlights. (That is putting it a little crudely; there might of course be no footlights! You will understand what I mean.) I need the footlights, he will feel, if I am to live in the play; the play then becomes for me something outside myself. And it is this fact of its becoming separate from himself that is such a wonderful experience for the actor. For now he, as it were, retrieves it, participating in it even while he is projecting it; and this new experience has the effect of sending him forth to explore with zest and eagerness the real life in the world outside. For such an actor, there will be no uncertainty about the boundary between real life and the stage.

In our day, unfortunately, the recognition of this boundary is little more than an ideal. I have known plenty of actors who ‘acted’ in real life, and on the stage could only just pass muster. My experience has indeed gone even farther than this. I once witnessed an incident in Berlin that throws a very interesting light on the whole question. We made the acquaintance of a medium who had a most remarkable effect upon people. They were dumbfounded by what he was able to do. He would sit on the sofa and proceed to say, not at all what he himself but what other people had to say. It was quite astonishing. Perhaps it would be Julius Caesar who put in an appearance; the medium would sit there and talk exactly as Julius Caesar might. He could, in fact, be possessed by Julius Caesar or by some other character. I do not now recall any of the others, but this was the kind of susceptibility that showed itself in the medium. People were charmed and bewildered at the same time. Now this medium was by profession an actor, and with him on the stage was a fellow actor who had long been a friend of mine. One day, when I had been present at one of these exhibitions of mediumship, I asked the medium: ‘Does my friend also know you well?’ ‘Oh yes,’ replied the medium, ‘and when he sees me like this, he always exclaims: “What a splendid actor!” I can, however, only reply: “But I am your colleague, and you know quite well that I'm no good at all on the stage.”’ For the medium would never have been able to personify Julius Caesar on the stage. But when he was in mediumistic condition, the people around him believed, and to a certain extent rightly believed, that the real Julius Caesar was speaking in him; and he did it so well that my friend (who afterwards became a Managing Director of some theatre), when he saw him in this condition, took him for an actor of outstanding ability. And little wonder; for it was all there complete, even to the facial expression. But on the stage he was just like a block of wood, standing there without moving a muscle of his countenance.

Here, you see, we are faced with an extreme instance of what the art of acting must never be. For it must never happen that an actor is passive and possessed by his part. And this man was of course simply possessed. I have explained the relationship that an actor should have to his part. It must be objective for him. He must feel it as something that he has himself created and formed; and yet all the time he himself must be there in his own form, standing beside the form he has created. And then this creation of his can thrill him with joy or plunge him into sadness, just as truly as can events and doings in the world outside.

You will learn to find your way to this experience if you study your part in the way I have described. And it is necessary that you should do so. It will bring you to the esoteric in your own being.

Yesterday we were speaking of two things that come into consideration for the stage under present conditions—décor and lighting. I have no desire to dismiss outright the idea of an open-air theatre; but, as I said then, if we want to speak about dramatic art in a practical manner, we can only do so with a view to the stage that is in general use. And so what I had to say about stage décor and lighting had reference entirely to the modern stage. I would like, however, at this point to consider for a moment the theatre more in general. Starting from the experience of the present day, let us now see what it would mean if we had a stage like the stage of Shakespeare's time.

When we see one of Shakespeare's plays performed today, it can give us very little idea of how the play looked on a stage of his own time. There was, to begin with, a fair-sized enclosure not unlike an alehouse yard, and here sat the London populace of those times. Then there was what served for stage, and on the left and right sides of it were placed chairs where sat the more aristocratic folk and also various persons connected with the theatre. These people the actor would thus have in close proximity He would moreover also feel himself only half on the stage and half among the common people down below—and how delighted he would be when he could direct an ‘aside’ to these! The Prologue too, an indispensable figure in the play, addressed his part primarily to the public below. It was indeed quite taken for granted that every effort would be made to attract and please the public. They joined in and made their own contribution to the performance—tittering or howling, yelling or cheering, even on occasion pelting with rotten apples. Such things were accepted as a regular part of the show. And this good-humoured understanding between stage and audience, that had something of a spark of genius about it, infected even the more pedantic and heavy-going among the spectators—for there were such in those days too; they felt themselves caught up into the atmosphere. Shakespeare; himself an actor, understood very well how to take his audience with him. You have only to listen to the cadence of his sentences to be convinced of this. Shakespeare spoke, in fact, straight out of the heart of his audience. It is untrue today to say that people ‘listen’ to a play of Shakespeare's; for we no longer listen in the way people listened when Shakespeare was there on the stage with his company.

I have spoken already of how all work in connection with the theatre can be regarded in an esoteric light, and I want now to carry the matter a little further by describing to you something else the actor needs to develop.

Yesterday I was telling you of an experience that you would perhaps not easily believe could have any connection with the development of an actor—the experience, namely, of the rainbow. But, my dear friends, experiences like that of the rainbow are by their very nature closely connected with the deeper processes of life's happenings. Has it ever occurred to you how little we know of all that goes on in a human being when, simply from eating of a particular dish, he gets bright red cheeks? All kinds of things have been happening inside him that lie entirely beyond the range of direct observation. Similarly you must realise that you cannot expect to reason out logically the effect that the experience of the rainbow has on the actor. But you will soon see how differently that actor will use his body on the stage. Not that his movements will show particular skill, but they will show art. To move artistically has to be learned on an inward path. And the description I gave you yesterday was of one such path. There are many more; and particularly important for the actor is one that I will now describe.

An actor should develop a delicate feeling for the experience of the world of dreams. We could even set it down as an axiom that the better an actor trains himself to live in his dreams, so that he can recall their pictures and consciously conjure up before him again and again all his dream experiences—the better he is able to do this, the better will be his carriage and bearing on the stage. He will not merely be one who carries himself well externally; throughout his part his whole bearing will have art, will have style.

This is where the deeper realm of the esoteric begins for the actor—when he is able to enter with full understanding into the world of dreams. He has then to come to the point where he discerns a difference of which everyone knows and has experience, but which is not generally experienced with sufficient intensity. I mean the following.

Think of how it is with us when we are developing our thoughts and feelings in the full tide and bustle of everyday life. Let us imagine, for instance, we are at a tea-party. A master of ceremonies is darting about, continually making those little jokes of his of which he is so vain, a dancer is exerting all her charm, a stiff-looking professor who has with difficulty been induced to come feels himself in duty bound to express well-feigned admiration of everything, in not quite audible murmurs. One could continue on and on describing some scene of this kind out of everyday life. But now consider the vast difference there is between an experience of this nature—which may be said to approach the extreme in one direction—and the experience you have when, in complete solitude, you let your dreams unfold before you. It is important to discern this difference, to see it for what it is, and then to develop a feeling for what it means to pass from the one experience to the other, to pass, that is, from a condition where you are chafed and exhausted in soul by the racket of the life around you, and go right through to the very opposite experience where you are entirely alone and given up to your dreams. These, one might imagine, could be only feebly experienced; nevertheless, you know as you watch them go past that you are deeply and intimately connected with them. To grow familiar with this path of the soul that takes you from the first experience to the second, to undertake esoteric training that will help you to follow it again and again with growing power of concentration—that, my dear friends, will prepare you to take hold of your work as actors with understanding and with life.

For, in order to make your part live, you have first of all to approach it as you approach real life when it meets you with all its chaotic and disquieting details, and then go on to study the part intently, making it more and more your own, until you come at last Jo feel with it the same sort of intimate bond that you hale with some dream of yours in the moment of recalling it. I am, I know, holding up before you an ideal; but ideals can start you out on the right road.

This kind of preparation has to go forward at the same time as you are bringing the speaking of the part to its full development, that is, to where the speaking flows on of itself in the way I have described. The two paths have to be followed side by side. You have, on the one hand, to come to the point where you are able to dream your part, where the single passages in it begin to merge and lose their distinctness, and you come to feel your part as a unity, as one great whole—not, however, suffering it to lose in the process any of its variety of colouring. The single passages you then no longer perceive as single passages, their individual content disappears; and in that moment you are able to place before your mind's eye a dreamlike impression of the whole of your part right through the play. That is the one path. The other is that you should be able to tear yourself right out of this experience and produce with ease and freedom your formed speaking of the part, producing it and reproducing it again and again. If these two paths of preparation run parallel with one another, then your part will come to life, then it will acquire being.

And I think the actor and the musician or singer can here find themselves in agreement about- the way each understands his art. The pianist, for example, has also to come to the point when, to put it rather radically, he can play his piece in his sleep—when, that is, his hands move right through the piece involuntarily, moving as it were of themselves. And he too must on the other hand be able to be thrilled with delight or plunged into sadness by what his own art has brought into being.

Here again a danger confronts the artist, whether actor or musician. The emotional experience that he owes to his own creation must not develop in the direction of ‘swelled head’. It must not be because of his own ability that the artist is thrilled with delight. (The opposite mood does not so often show itself!) He must on the contrary have his consciousness centred all the time upon the thing he has created and objectified.

If you have prepared your part in this way, working out of a fine sensitiveness for the world of dreams, and if along with this you have succeeded in mastering the art of objectifying your speaking, then you will bring to the stage the very best that the individual actor can bring. And a further thing follows from this too.

When you have come so far as to be able to behold the play there before you in its entirety—the separate scenes and details, each with its own colouring, existing for you only as parts of the whole which lies spread out before you like a tableau—then the exactly right moment has come when you can set about ‘forming’ the stage. For now you will be ready to give it the décor that properly belongs to it, working on the lines I explained yesterday. If you were to build up your picture of the stage like a mosaic, piecing it together out of the feelings you have of the several scenes, it would have no art or order. But if you have pressed forward first of all to achieve this living experience of the play as a whole, so that when you come to ask: What is it like in the beginning? What impression does it make upon me in the middle?, you never, in considering any section of it, lose sight of the whole—then your configuration of the stage will be harmonious throughout, will be a unity.

And only then, my dear friends, only then will you be capable of judging how far you can go with the indoor stage of today, complete with its inevitable footlights and the rest, where nevertheless you will, of course, have somehow to produce when necessary the illusion of daylight; or how far you can go in adapting your external décor in a simple, primitive way to what is spoken by the characters; or again, let us say, how far you can go in staging a play in the open air.

Whatever kind of play you have in hand, it will demand its own particular style, which can be neither intellectually discovered nor intellectually described, but has to be inwardly felt. As we press forward, working in the way I have explained, to a deeper understanding of dramatic art, we shall find for each play the relevant style, we shall perceive it. If we are dealing with the stage conditions that are customary at the present day, we shall want to take our guidance as far as ever possible from the perception we have arrived at of the tableau of the play as a whole. The modern stage with its lighting and its elaborate décor demands that we shall follow the path of preparation that takes us to that dreamlike survey of which I have spoken, where the whole play lies spread out before us like a tableau. For it is a fact that for representations in artificial light, the more the total picture of the play conveys to the actor the impression of half-dreamed fantasy, the better. If you who are acting have let the picture of the stage be born out of dreams, out of dreams that have been cast in the mould of fantasy, then the audience, having this picture before them, will receive the impression of something that is alive and real.

The case will of course be different if your audience is looking, let us say—to go to the opposite extreme—at a background of Nature. For an open-air performance, all you can do in the way of ‘forming’ your stage is to select the spot that seems the most favourable for the piece. You will of course be limited by your possibilities. You have to put your theatre somewhere; you have really no free choice, but must be content with what there is. Let us suppose, however, that you have decided upon a spot and are preparing for an open-air performance.

You have succeeded, we will assume, in having the play before your mind's eye as a complete, continuous tableau. Then, holding fast this perception of the play as a whole, you let Nature appear in the background. (You will need to be quite active inwardly, so as to be able to see both at the same moment.) There behind, you have the real landscape. You cannot alter it, you have to take it as it is. And here in front, of course, are the seats for the audience, which always look so frightful in Nature's world.¹ And now, with all this before you, you must be able to superimpose your own picture of the play, the picture that has emerged out of dream, on to the picture that Nature is displaying in the background, letting it veil Nature's picture as though with a cloud.

The work of forming anything artistically has to be done by the soul. Need we wonder then that, in order to prepare ourselves for it, we have to go back to soul experience? In front, therefore, of the landscape that Nature provides, you will have the experience that has come to you from the play. And then—yes, then you will find, as you hold all this before you and think it through with all the energy you can command, that those rocks, those distant snow-capped mountains, fir-clad slopes, and green meadows—all that whole background of Nature begins to make itself felt, begins to give you inspiration for your masking of the individual figures on the stage—whether you produce the effect by means of make-up, or give them real masks, as did the Greeks, who felt these to be a natural necessity on the stage. And you will find that out in the open, Nature will require you to give far more decided colouring to your speech than is necessary in the intimacy of an indoor theatre. The several actors will also have to be much more sharply distinguished one from another than in an artificially lighted theatre, both in the colouring you give them to accord with their character, and in the colouring that is determined by the situation.

I would strongly recommend students of dramatic art to practise going through such experiences again and again. Their importance is not limited to the help they can give for particular performances, they are important for every actor's development. You cannot be a good actor until you have learned such things from your own experience, until you have felt how the voices of the parts have to be pitched in the one case, and how differently they must be pitched in the other case, where the play is being acted in Nature's own theatre.

In the times in which we are living, the actor has to undergo training if he is to acquire such experiences ; he has to learn them consciously. To Shakespeare they were instinctive. All that I have been describing to you, Shakespeare and his fellow-actors knew instinctively. They had imagination, you see, they had a picture-making fantasy; you can see it from the very way Shakespeare forms his speeches. Yes, they had a picture-making fantasy. And Shakespeare could do two things He had on the one hand a marvellous perception for what the audience is experiencing while an actor is speaking on the stage; you can detect this just in those passages in his plays that are most characteristic of his genius. He could sense. with wonderful accuracy the effect some speech was having upon the spectators sitting on the left of the stage, the effect it was having upon those sitting on the right, and again upon the main audience down in front. A fine, imponderable sensitiveness enabled him to share in the experience of each. And then, on the other hand, Shakespeare had the same delicate, sensitive feeling for all that might go on upon a stage which was, after all, no more than a slightly transformed alehouse! For Shakespeare knew very well, from experience, the kind of things that go on in an alehouse, he had a perfect understanding of that side of life. Shakespeare was by no means altogether the ‘utterly lonely’ figure that some learned old fogeys like to picture him. He knew how to bring on his actors—or take part himself—in a way that sorted well with the primitive realities of the stage of his time.

If you were to act today on the modern stage, with all its refinements of décor, lighting and so forth—if you were to act there today as men acted in Shakespeare's time, then a young schoolgirl who had been brought to the theatre for the first time (the rest of the audience would naturally have grown accustomed to it) would exclaim as soon as the play began: But why ever do they shout so? Yes, if we were to listen without bias to a play acted in true Shakespearian manner, we would have the impression that the actors were shouting, that the whole performance was nothing but a confused, discordant shouting. In those days, however, it was quite in place. Under primitive stage conditions it is not shouting, it is fully developed dramatic art.

In proportion, however, as we go in for more and more décor and lighting effects, it becomes a necessity to subdue, to soften down, not only the speaking voice, but even also the inner intensity of the acting. In such a changed environment it is not possible to act with the same intensity. You should be able to appreciate that this must be so. The ability of an actor, the range of his capacity as an artist, will depend on how far he can feel for himself inner connections of this kind. That way too lies the path that will verily take him into the esoteric side of his calling; for to find this path, he needs to be able to live in such truths, to be able continually to awaken them in his heart, again and again.

If the actor achieves this, if he learns to live in these truths, then gradually it will come about that they form themselves for him into meditations. He can of course have other meditations as well, but the content of his meditation as actor he must find on this path. And then he will begin also to take an increasingly wide interest in all that goes on in real life, outside the stage. For that is a mark of a really good actor. He will retain, throughout his career as actor, the most far-reaching interest in all the little things of life. An actor who is unable to be delighted, for example, with the drollery of a hedgehog, an actor who does not enjoy and admire it in a more delicate way than others do, will never be a first-rate actor. If he is the sort of man who could never exclaim: ‘But how that young lawyer did laugh when he heard that joke! Never in all my life shall I forget it!’—if he is a man who is incapable of throwing out such an exclamation with genuine and hearty enjoyment, then he is incapable also of being a really good actor. And an actor who, having taken off his make-up and left the theatre, is not assailed by all manner of strange dreams, amounting often to nightmare—he too cannot be a first-rate actor. While the actor is on his way home from the theatre, or, as is perhaps more likely, on his way to some restaurant to get a meal, it should really be so that out of all the dream-cloud of the performance, some detail suddenly thrusts itself before his mind's eye. ‘Oh, that woman in the side box,’ he says to himself, ‘how she did annoy me again, holding up her lorgnette to gaze at me just when I had to speak that passage! ... And how it put me out too when at the most critical moment of the play some silly girl right up at the top of the gallery began to giggle—I suppose her neighbour was pinching her!’

While the play is on, the actor knows nothing at all of these little incidents, he is quite unconscious of them. But you know what happens sometimes in ordinary life. You come home and sit down quietly with a book. All of a sudden, a big headline appears right across the page you are reading: ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ The words place themselves clearly before you. (I dare say most of you can recall some such experience, though perhaps not quite so pronounced.) All the time you were out, you never saw those words. Suddenly they superimpose themselves on the page that lies open before you, and you read : ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ Afterwards it dawns upon you that the words were on a shop sign that you passed on the way home. Without entering your consciousness, they went straight down into your sub-conscious. And had you been a medium and had Schrenk-Nötzing made experiments on you, then you would have produced the effluvia from the appropriate glands (for such things do happen!) and in the effluvia would stand the words: ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ That is what would have happened to a medium. In the case of a normal person, the words simply make their appearance in front of the book he is reading, like a somewhat dim hallucination. They are there, you see, in the sub-conscious.

In ordinary life there is no occasion to pay particular attention to an incident of this kind—unless of course one is in the medical profession, when it may be one's duty to investigate such matters with all care and exactness. Art, however, obeys quite other laws in the matter of the human soul. From the point of view of art, an actor can never be an actor of real ability, if the sort of thing I have mentioned does not happen to him now and then on his way home from the theatre, if he does not, for instance, suddenly feel: ‘Heavens, how that old woman up there turned her miserable lorgnette on me!’ He did not notice her during the play, but now as he makes his way home, there she is in front of him, with her grey eyes and frowning eyebrows and untidy hair, her stiff fingers grasping the handle of her lorgnette—it weighs on him like an incubus!

That, however, will only be a proof that the actor lives in all that takes place around him, lives in it objectively. Although he is acting, he stands at the same time fully in life, he participates even in what he does not observe, in what he must not observe at the time—not merely need not, but must not. While, however, he is absorbed in the creation of his part, while his whole consciousness is directed to what he has to say and do, his sub-conscious has on that very account all the better opportunity for making keen and detailed observation of everything that is going on around him. And if he has achieved what I described as an esoteric secret for the stage-actor, namely, that when he leaves the stage he is in very deed and truth away from it, away from everything to do with it, and enters right into real life—if the actor has achieved this secret, then on his leaving the theatre this subconscious in him will begin to make itself felt, and all the various grotesque and distorted pictures that can remain with him from the performance will suddenly display themselves, so that now at last, after the event, he experiences them consciously. Naturally, it may often also be very lovely impressions that come back to him in this way.

I had opportunity once to witness an amazing instance of this kind of memory-experience. The actor Kainz² had just come from a performance, laden as it were with these nightmares, and found himself in a company of friends, including a Russian authoress with whom he particularly liked to share such impressions. It was wonderful to hear these coming out. Kainz was not in the least embarrassed about the matter, or one would naturally not want to talk of it. There they were, all the things he had experienced sub-consciously during the performance—there they were, living on in him in this way, the experience perhaps enhanced in his case by the contempt he felt for the audience. For Kainz was one of those actors who have the utmost contempt for their audiences.

It is things of this nature that can help you to a true understanding of dramatic art. They make no particular appeal to the intellect; but it is by the path of imagination and of picture that we have to travel, following forms that are of fantasy's creation, if we would come at last to the essential being of dramatic art. For this reason dramatic art cannot tolerate in its school the presence of teachers who have not a sensitive artistic feeling. (As a matter of fact, this is true of every art.) And I have always regarded it as a most undesirable addition to the faculty of a school of dramatic art when, for example, a professor of literature is brought in to give lessons to the students. All that goes on in such a school, everything that is done there, must be genuinely artistic through and through. And no one can speak artistically about any art unless he can live in that art with his whole being!

To-morrow, then, we will continue, and I shall have to tell you of another esoteric secret connected with the art of the stage.

• 1. Dr. Steiner made here a coloured drawing on the blackboard.
• 2. Josef Kainz (1858–1910) was well known all over Germany and Austria, and toured also in the U.S.A. Romeo and Hamlet were among his leading parts.

When we discuss, in connection with spiritual-science, other spiritual worlds besides our physical world, and declare that the human being sustains a relationship, not only to this physical world, but also to super-sensible realms, the question may arise as to what is to be found within the human soul—before one achieves any sort of clairvoyant capacity—which is super-sensible, which gives an indication that the human being is connected with super-sensible worlds. In other words, can even the ordinary person, possessed of no clairvoyant capacity, observe something in the soul, experience something, which bears a relationship to the higher realms? In essence, both today's lecture and that of tomorrow will be devoted to the answering of this question.

When we observe the life of the human soul, it manifests three parts in a certain way independent of one another and yet, on the other hand, closely bound together.

The first thing that confronts us when we direct attention to ourselves as souls is our conceptual life, which includes also in a certain way our thinking, our memory. Memory and thought are not something physical. They belong to the invisible, super-sensible world: in man's thought-life he has something which points to the higher worlds. What this conceptual world is may be grasped by each person in the following way. We bring before him an object, which he observes. Then he turns away. He has not immediately forgotten the object, but preserves within himself a living picture of it. Thus do we have concepts of the world surrounding us, and we may speak of the conceptual life as a part of our soul life.

A second part of our soul life we can observe if we inquire whether we do not possess within us something else related to objects and beings besides our concepts. We do, indeed, have something else. It is what we call feelings of love and hate, what we designate in our thinking by the terms sympathy, antipathy. We consider one thing beautiful, another ugly; perhaps, we love one thing and hate another; one we feel to be good, the other evil. If we wish to summarize what thus appears in our inner life, we may call it emotions of the heart. The life of the heart is something quite different from the conceptual life. In the life of the heart we have a far more intimate indication of the invisible than in the life of concepts. It is a second component of our soul-organism, this life of emotions. Thus we have already two soul-components, our life of thought and of emotion.

Of a third we become aware when we say to ourselves, not only that we consider a thing beautiful or ugly, good or evil, but that we feel impelled to do this or that, when we have the impulse to act. When we undertake anything, perform a relatively important act or even merely take hold of an object, there must always be an impulse within us which induces us to do this. These impulses, moreover, are gradually transformed into habits, and we do not always need to bring our impulses to bear in connection with everything that we do. When we go out, for instance, intending to go to the railway station, we do not then purpose to take the first, second, and third steps; we simply go to the station. Back of all this lies the third member of our soul life, our will impulses, as something ranging wholly beyond the visible.

If we now connect with these three impulses characteristic of the human being our initial question, whether the ordinary man possesses any clue to the existence of higher worlds, we must take cognizance of dream life, how this is related to the three soul elements: the thought impulse, the emotions, the impulse of will.

These three components of our soul life we can clearly differentiate: our thought life, our emotions, and our will impulses. If we reflect somewhat about our soul life, we can differentiate among these three single components of the life of the soul in our external existence. Let us first take the life of concepts. The thought life follows its course throughout the day—if we are not actually void of thought. Throughout the day we have concepts; and, when we grow tired in the evening, these concepts first become hazy. It is as if they became transmuted into a sort of fog. This life becomes feebler and feebler, finally vanishing altogether, and we can then go to sleep. Thus this conceptual life, as we possess it on the physical plane, persists from our waking till our falling asleep, and disappears the moment we fall asleep. No one will suppose that, when he is really sleeping—that is, if he is not clairvoyant during sleep—his thought life can nevertheless continue just as while he is awake. The life of thought—or the conceptual life—which occupies us fully from our waking till our falling asleep, must be extinguished, and only then can we go to sleep.

But the human being must recognize that the concepts he has, which have so overwhelmingly taken possession of him during the day, and which he always has unless he merely drowses along, are no hindrance to his falling to sleep. That this is so is best seen when we surrender ourselves to particularly vigorous concepts before falling asleep—for instance, by reading in a very difficult book. When we have been thinking really intensely, we most easily fall asleep; and so if we cannot go to sleep, it is good to take up a book, or occupy ourselves with something which requires concentrated thinking—study a mathematical book, for instance. This will help us to fall asleep; but not something, on the other hand, in which we are deeply interested, such as a novel containing much that captivates our interest. Here our emotions become aroused, and the life of the emotions is something that hinders us from falling asleep. When we go to bed with our feelings vividly stirred, when we know that we have burdened our soul with something or when there is a special joy in our heart which has not yet subsided, it frequently happens that we turn and toss in bed and are unable to fall asleep. In other words, whereas concepts unaccompanied by emotions weary us, so that we easily fall asleep, precisely that which strongly affects our feelings prevents us from falling asleep. It is impossible then to bring about the separation within ourselves which is necessary if we are to enter into the state of sleep. We can thus see that the life of emotions in us has a different relationship to our whole existence from that of our life of thought.

If we wish, however, to make the distinction quite correctly, we must take cognizance of something else: that is, our dreams. It might be supposed at first that, when the variegated life of dreams works upon us, this consists of concepts continuing their existence into the state of sleep. But, if we test the matter quite accurately, we shall observe that our conceptual life is not continued in our dreams. That which by its very nature wearies us does not continue during our dreams. This occurs only when our concepts. are associated with intense emotions.

It is the emotions that appear in dream pictures. But to realize this it is necessary, of course, to test these things adequately. Take an example:—Someone dreams that he is young again and has one experience or another. Immediately thereafter the dream is transformed and something occurs which he may not have experienced at all. Some sort of occurrence becomes manifest to him which is alien to his memory, because he has not experienced this on the physical plane. But persons known to him appear. How often it occurs that one finds oneself during dreams involved in actions in connection with which one is in the company of friends or acquaintances whom one has not seen for a long time. But, if we examine the thing adequately, we shall be forced to the conclusion that emotions are back of what emerges in dreams. Perhaps, we still cling to the friend of that time, are not yet quite severed from him; there must still be some sort of emotion in us which is connected with him. Nothing occurs in dreams that is not connected with emotions. Accordingly, we must draw a certain conclusion here—that is, that when the concepts which our waking life of day impart to us do not appear in dreams, this proves that they do not accompany us into sleep. When emotions keep us from sleeping, this proves that they do not release us, that they must be present in order to be able to appear in dream pictures. It is the emotions which bring us the dream concepts. This is due to the fact that the emotions are far more intimately connected with man's real being than is the life of thought. The emotions we carry over even into sleep. In other words, they are a soul element that remains united with us even during sleep. In contrast with ordinary concepts, the emotions are something that accompanies us into sleep, something far more closely, more intensely, connected with the human individuality than is ordinary thinking not pervaded by emotion.

How is it with the third soul component, with the impulses of will? There also we can present a sort of example. Of course, this can be observed only by persons who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep in a rather subtle way. If a person has acquired through training a certain capacity to observe this moment, this observation is extremely interesting. At first, our concepts appear to us to be enveloped in mist; the external world vanishes, and we feel as if our soul being were extended beyond our bodily nature, as if we were no longer compressed within the limits of our skin but were flowing out into the elements of the cosmos. A profound feeling of satisfaction may be associated with falling asleep. Then comes a moment when a certain memory arises. Most likely, extremely few persons have this experience, but we can perceive this moment if we are sufficiently attentive. There appear before our vision the good and also the evil impulses of will that we have experienced; and the strange thing is that, in the presence of the good impulses, One has the feeling: "This is something connected with all wholesome will forces, something that invigorates you." If the good will impulses present themselves to the soul before the person falls asleep, he feels so much the fresher and more filled with life-forces, and the feeling often arises: "If only this moment could last forever! If only this moment could endure for eternity!" Then one feels, in addition, how the bodily nature is deserted by the soul element. Finally there comes a jerk, and he falls asleep. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to experience this, but only to observe the life of the soul.

We must infer from this something extremely important. Our will impulses work before we fall asleep, and we feel that they fructify us. We sense an extraordinary invigoration. As regards the mere emotions, we had to say that these are more closely connected with our individuality than is our ordinary thinking, our ordinary act of conceiving. So we must now say of that which constitutes our will impulses: "This is not merely something that remains with us during sleep, but something which becomes a strengthening, an empowering, of the life within us." Still more intimately by far are the will impulses in us connected with our life than are our emotions; and whoever frequently observes the moment of falling asleep feels in this moment that, if he cannot look back upon any good will impulses during the day, the effect of this is as if there had been killed within him something of that which enters into the state of sleep. In other words, the will impulses are connected with health and disease, with the life force in us.

Thoughts cannot be seen. We see the rose bush at first by means used in ordinary physical perception; but, when the beholder turns aside or goes away, the image of the object remains in him. He does not see the object but he can form a mental image of it. That is, our thought life is something super-sensible. Completely super-sensible are our emotions; and our will impulses, although they are transmuted into actions, are none the less something super-sensible. But we know at once likewise, when we take into consideration everything which has now been said, that our thought life not permeated by will impulses is least closely connected with us.

Now, it might be supposed that what has just been said is refuted by the fact that, on the following day our concepts of the preceding day confront us again; that we can recollect them. Indeed, we are obliged to recollect. We must, in a super-sensible way, call our concepts back into memory.

With our emotions, the situation is different; they are most intimately united with us. If we have gone to bed in a mood of remorse, we shall sense upon awaking the next morning that we have waked with a feeling of dullness—or something of the sort. If we experienced remorse, we sense this the next day in our body as weakness, lethargy, numbness; joy we sense as strength and elevation of spirits. In this case we do not need first to remember the remorse or the joy, to reflect about them; we feel them in our body. We do not need to recollect what has been there: it is there, it has passed into sleep with us and has lived with us. Our emotions are more intensely, more closely, bound up with the eternal part of us than are our thoughts.

But any one who is able to observe his will impulses feels that they are simply present again; they are always present. It may be that, at the moment of waking, we note that we experience again in its immediacy, in a certain sense, what we experienced as joy in life on the preceding day through our good moral impulses. In reality nothing so refreshes us as that which we cause to flow through our souls on the preceding day in the form of good moral impulses. We may say, therefore, that what we call our will impulses is most intimately of all bound up with our existence.

Thus the three soul components are different from one another, and we shall understand, if we clearly grasp these distinctions, that occult knowledge justifies the assertion that our thoughts, which are super-sensible, bring us into relationship with the super-sensible world, our emotions with another super-sensible world, and our will impulses with still another, even more intimately bound up with our own real being. For this reason we make the following assertion. When we perceive with the external senses, we can thereby perceive everything that is in the physical world. When we conceive, our life of concepts, our thought life, is in relationship with the astral world. Our emotions bring us into connection with what we call the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan. And our moral impulses brings us into connection with the Higher Devachan, or the World of Reason. Man thus stands in relationship with three worlds through the impulses of thought, emotion, and will. To the extent that he belongs to the astral world, he can carry his thoughts into the astral world; he can carry his emotions into the world of Devachan; he can carry into the higher Heavenly World all that he possesses in his soul of the nature of will impulses.¹

When we consider the matter in this way, we shall see how justified occult science is in speaking of the three worlds. And, when we take this into consideration, we shall view the realm of the moral in an entirely different way; for the realm of good will impulses gives us a relationship to the highest of the three worlds into which the being of man extends.

Our ordinary thought life reaches only up to the astral world. No matter how brilliant our thoughts may be, thoughts that are not sustained by feelings go no further than into the astral world; they have no significance for other worlds. You will certainly understand in this connection what is said in regard to external science, dry, matter-of-fact external science. No man can by means of thoughts not permeated by emotion affirm anything regarding other worlds than the astral realm. Under ordinary circumstances, the thinking of the scientist, of the chemist, the mathematician, runs its course without any sort of feeling. This goes no further than just under the surface. Indeed, scientific research even demands that it shall proceed in this way, and for this reason it penetrates only into the astral world.

Only when delight or repugnance are associated with the thoughts of the research scientist is there added to these thoughts the element needed in order to penetrate the world of Devachan. Only when emotions enter into thoughts, into concepts, when we feel one thing to be good and another evil, do we combine with thoughts that which carries them into the Heavenly World. Only then can we get a glimpse into deeper foundations of existence. If we wish to grasp something belonging to the world of Devachan, no theories help us in the least. The only thing that helps us is to unite feelings with our thoughts. Thinking carries us only into the astral world.

When the geometrician, for example, grasps the relationships pertaining to the triangle, this helps him only into the astral element. But, when he grasps the triangle as a symbol, and derives from it what lies therein as to the participation of the human being in the three worlds, something regarding his threefoldness, this helps him to a higher level. One who feels in symbols the expression for the soul force, one who inscribes this in his heart, one who feels in connection with everything that people generally merely know, brings his thoughts into connection with Devachan. For this reason, in meditating we must feel our way through what is given us, for only thus do we bring ourselves into connection with the world of Devachan. Ordinary science, therefore, void of any feeling of the heart, can never bring the human being, no matter how keen it may be, into connection with anything except the astral world.

Art, music, painting and the like, on the other hand, lead man into the lower Devachan world. To this statement the objection might be raised that, if it is true that the emotions really lead one into the lower Devachan world, passions, appetites, instincts, would also do this. Indeed, they do. But this is only an evidence of the fact that we are more intimately bound up with our feelings than with our thoughts. Our sympathies may be associated with our lower nature also; an emotional life is brought about by appetites and instincts also, and this leads into lower Devachan. Whereas we absolve in Kamaloka whatever false thoughts we have, we carry with us into the world of Devachan all that we have developed up to the stage of emotions; and this imprints itself upon us even into the next incarnation, so that it comes to expression in our Karma. Through our life of feeling, so far as this can have these two aspects, we either raise ourselves into the world of Devachan, or we outrage it.

Through our will impulses, on the contrary, which are either moral or immoral, we either have a good relationship with the higher world or we injure it, and have to compensate for this in our Karma. If a person is so evil and degenerate that he establishes such a connection with the higher world through his evil impulses as actually to injure this, he is cast out. But the impulse must, nevertheless, have originated in the higher world. The significance of the moral life becomes clear to us in all its greatness when we view the matter in this way.

Out of the worlds with which the human being is in such a close relationship through his threefold soul nature and also through his physical nature—out of these realms proceed those forces which can lead man through the world. That is, when we observe an object belonging to the physical world, this can occur only through the fact that we have eyes to see it with: it is thus that the human being is in relationship with the physical world. Through the fact that he develops his life of thought, he is in relationship with the astral world; through the development of his life of feeling, he is connected with the world of Devachan; and through his moral life with the world of upper Devachan.

The human being has four relationships with four worlds. But this signifies nothing else than that he has a relationship with the Beings of these worlds. From this point of view it is interesting to reflect upon man's evolution, to look into the past, the present, and the immediate future.

From the worlds we have mentioned there proceed those forces which penetrate into our lives. Here we have to point out that, in the epoch which lies behind us, human beings were primarily dependent upon influences from the physical world, primarily capacitated to receive impulses out of the physical world. This lies behind us as the Graeco-Latin epoch. During this epoch Christ worked on earth in a physical body. Since the human being was then capacitated primarily to receive the influences of the forces existing in the physical world, Christ had to appear on the physical plane.

At present we live in an epoch in which thinking is primarily developed, in which man receives his impulses out of the world of thought, the astral world. Even external history demonstrates this. We can scarcely refer to philosophers of the pre-Christian era; at most, to a preparatory stage of thinking. Hence the history of philosophy begins with Thales. Only after the Graeco-Latin epoch does scientific thinking appear. Intellectual thinking comes for the first time about the sixteenth century. This explains the great progress in the sciences, which exclude all emotion from the activity of thought. And science is so specially beloved in our day because in it thought is not permeated with emotions. Our science is void of feeling, and seeks its well-being in the utter absence of sentiments. Alas for one who should experience any feeling in connection with a laboratory experiment! This is characteristic of our epoch, which brings the human being into contact primarily with the astral plane.

The next age, following our own, will already be more spiritual. There the sentiments will play a role even in connection with science. If any one shall then wish to stand an examination for admission to some scientific study, it will be necessary for him to be able to sense the light that exists behind everything, the spiritual world which brings everything into existence. The value of scientific work in any test will then consist in the fact that one shall observe whether a person can develop in the test sufficient emotion; otherwise he will fail in the examination. Even though the candidate may have any amount of knowledge, he will not be able to pass the examination if he does not have the right sentiments. This certainly sounds very queer but it will be true, none the less, that the laboratory table will be raised to the level of an altar, at which the test of a person will consist in the fact that, in the electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, feelings will be developed in him corresponding with what the Gods feel when this occurs. The human being will then receive his impulses from an intimate connection with the lower Devachan.

And then will come the age that is to be the last before the next great earth catastrophe. This will be the age when man shall be related with the higher world in his will impulses, when that which is moral will be dominant on the earth. Then neither external ability nor the intellect nor the feelings will hold the first rank, but the impulses of will. Not man's skill but his moral quality will be determinative. Thus will humanity, upon arriving at this point of time, have reached the epoch of morality, during which man will be in a special relationship with the world of higher Devachan.

It is a truth that, in the course of evolution, there awaken in the human being ever greater powers of love, out of which he may draw his knowledge, his impulses, and his activities.

Whereas at an earlier period, when Christ came down to the earth in a physical body, human beings could not have perceived Him otherwise than in a physical body, there are actually awaking in our age the forces through which they shall see the Christ, not in His physical body, but in a form which will exist on the astral plane as an etheric form. Even in our century, from the 1930's on, and ever increasingly to the middle of the century, a great number of human beings will behold the Christ as an etheric form. This will constitute the great advance beyond the earlier epoch, when human beings were not yet ripe for beholding Him thus. This is what is meant by the saying that Christ will appear in the clouds; for this means that He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane.

But it must be emphasized that He can be seen in this epoch only in the etheric body. Any one who should believe that Christ will appear again in a physical body loses sight of the progress made by human powers. It is a blunder to suppose that such an event as the appearance of Christ can recur in the same manner as that in which it has already taken place.

The next event, then, is that human beings will see Christ on the astral plane in etheric form, and those who are then living on the physical plane, and who have taken in the teachings of spiritual-science, will see Him. Those, however, who are then no longer living, but who have prepared themselves through spiritual-scientific work will see Him, none the less, in etheric raiment between their death and rebirth. But there will be human beings also who will not be able to see Him in the etheric body. Those who shall have scorned spiritual-science will not be able to see Him, but will have to wait till the next incarnation, during which they may then devote themselves to the knowledge of the spirit and be able to prepare themselves in order that they may be able to understand what then occurs. It will not depend then upon whether a person has actually studied spiritual-science or not while living on the physical plane, except that the appearance of the Christ will be a rebuke and a torment to these, whereas those who strove to attain a knowledge of the spirit in the preceding incarnation will know what they behold.

Then will come an epoch when still higher powers will awake in human beings. This will be the epoch when the Christ will manifest Himself in still loftier manner; in an astral form in the lower world of Devachan. And the final epoch, that of the moral impulse will be that in which the human beings who shall have passed through the other stages will behold the Christ in His glory, as the form of the greatest "Ego," as the spiritualized Ego-Self, as the great Teacher of human evolution in the higher Devachan.

Thus the succession is as follows: In the Graeco-Latin epoch Christ appeared on the physical plane; in our epoch He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane; in the next epoch as an astral form on the plane of lower Devachan; and in the epoch of morality as the very essence and embodiment of the Ego.

We may now ask ourselves for what purpose spiritual-science exists. It is in order that there may be a sufficient number of human beings who shall be prepared when these events take place. And even now spiritual-science is working to the end that human beings may enter in the right way into connection with the higher worlds, to the end that they may enter rightly into the etheric-astral, into the aesthetic-Devachanic, into the moral-Devachanic. In our epoch it is the spiritual-scientific movement that aims, in a special way at the goal of having the human being capable in his moral impulses of entering into a right relationship with the Christ.

The next three millennia will be devoted to making the appearance of the Christ in the etheric visible. Only to those whose feelings are wholly materialistic will this be unattainable. A person may think materialistically when he admits the validity of matter alone and denies the existence of everything spiritual, or through the fact that he draws the spiritual down into the material. A person is materialistic also in admitting the existence of the spiritual only in material embodiment. There are also Theosophists who are materialists. These are those who believe that humanity is doomed to the necessity of beholding Christ again in a physical body. One does not escape from being a materialist through being a Theosophist, but through comprehending that the higher worlds exist even when we cannot se them in a sensible manifestation but must evolve up to them in order to behold them.

If we cause all this to pass before our minds, we may say that Christ is the true moral impulse which permeates humanity with moral power. The Christ impulse is power and life, the moral power which permeates the human being. But this moral power must be understood. Precisely as regards our own epoch it is necessary that Christ shall be proclaimed. For this reason Anthroposophy has the mission also of proclaiming the Christ in etheric form.

Before Christ appeared on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, the teaching about Him was prepared in advance. At that time, likewise, the physical Christ was proclaimed. It was primarily Jeshu ben Pandira who was the forerunner and herald, a hundred years before Christ. He also had the name Jesus, and, in contrast to Christ Jesus, he was called Jesus ben Pandira, son of Pandira. This man lived about a hundred years before our era. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to know this, for it is to be found in Rabbinical writings, and this fact has often been the occasion for confusing him with Christ Jesus. Jeshu ben Pandira was at first stoned and then hanged upon the beam of the cross. Jesus of Nazareth was actually crucified.

Who was this Jeshu ben Pandira? He is a great individuality who, since the time of Buddha—that is, about 600 B.C.—has been incarnated once in nearly every century in order to bring humanity forward. To understand him, we must go back to the nature of the Buddha.

We know, of course, that Buddha lived as a prince in the Sakya family five centuries and a half before the beginning of our era. The individuality who became the Buddha at that time had not already been a Buddha. Buddha, that prince who gave to humanity the doctrine of compassion, had not been born in that age as Buddha. For Buddha does not signify an individuality; Buddha is a rank of honor, This Buddha was born as a Bodhisattva and was elevated to the Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, while he sat absorbed in meditation under the Bodhi tree and brought down from the spiritual heights into the physical world the doctrine of compassion. A Bodhisattva he had previously been—that is, in his previous incarnations also—and then he became a Buddha. But the situation is such that the position of a Bodhisattva—that is of a teacher of humanity in physical form—became thereby vacant for a certain period of time, and had to be filled again. As the Bodhisattva who had incarnated at that time ascended in the twenty-ninth year of his life to the Buddha, the rank of the Bodhisattva was at once transferred to another individuality. Thus we must speak of a successor of the Bodhisattva who had now risen to the rank of Buddha. The successor to the Gautama-Buddha-Bodhisattva was that individuality who incarnated a hundred years before Christ as Jeshu ben Pandira, as a herald of the. Christ in the physical body.

He is now to be the Bodhisattva of humanity until he shall in his turn advance to the rank of Buddha after 3,000 years, reckoned from the present time. In other words, he will require exactly 5,000 years to rise from a Bodhisattva to a Buddha. He who has been incarnated nearly every century since that time, is now also already incarnated, and will be the real herald of the Christ in etheric raiment, just as he proclaimed the Christ at that time in advance as the physical Christ. And even many of us will ourselves experience the fact that, during the 1930's, there will be persons—and more and more later in the century—who will behold the Christ in etheric raiment.

It is in order to prepare for this that spiritual-science exists, and every one who' works at the task of spiritual-science shares in making this preparation.

The manner in which humanity is taught by its Leaders, but especially by a Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, changes greatly from epoch to epoch.

Spiritual-science could not have been taught in the Graeco-Latin epoch in the manner in which it is taught today; this would not have been understood by any one at that time. In that period, the Christ Being had to make manifest in physically visible form the goal of evolution, and only thus could He then work. Spiritual research spreads this teaching ever increasingly among human beings, and they will come to understand more and more the Christ Impulse until the Christ Himself shall have entered into them.

Today it is possible by means of the physically uttered word, in concepts and 'ideas, by means of thinking, to make the goal understandable and to influence men's souls in a good way, in order to fire them with enthusiasm for aesthetic and moral ideals. But the speech of today will be replaced in later periods of time by forces capable of a mightier stimulation than that which is possible at present by means of speech alone. Then will speech, the word, bring it about that there shall dwell in the word itself powers which shall convey feelings of the heart from soul to soul, from master to pupil, from the Bodhisattva to all those who do not turn away from him. It will then be possible for speech to be the bearer of aesthetic feelings of the heart. But the dawn of a new epoch is needed for this. In our time it would not be possible even for the Bodhisattva himself to exert such influences through the larynx as will then be possible.

And during the final period of time, before the great war of all against all, the situation will be such that, as speech is at present the bearer of thoughts and conceptions and as it will later be the bearer of the feelings of the heart, so will it then carry the moral element, the moral impulses, transmitting these from soul to soul. At present the word cannot have a moral influence. Such words can by no means be produced by our larynx as it is today. But such a power of spirit will one day exist. Words will be spoken through which the human being will receive moral power. Three thousand years after our present time will the Bodhisattva we have mentioned become the Buddha, and his teaching will then cause impulses to stream directly into humanity. He will be the One whom the ancients foresaw: the Buddha Maitreya, a Bringer of Good.

He has the mission of preparing humanity in advance so that it may understand the true Christ Impulse: He has the mission of directing men's eyes more and more to that which men can love, to bring it about that what men can spread abroad as a theory shall flow into a moral channel so that at length all that men can possess in the form of thoughts shall stream into the moral life. And, whereas it is still entirely possible today that a person may be very keen intellectually but immoral, we are approaching a time when it will be impossible for any one to be at the same time intellectually shrewd and immoral. It will be impossible for mental shrewdness and immorality to go hand in hand.

This is to be understood in the following way. Those who have kept themselves apart, and have opposed the course of evolution, will be the ones who will then battle together, all against all. Even those who develop today the highest intelligence, if they do not develop further during the succeeding epochs in the heart and in the moral life, will gain nothing from their shrewdness. The highest intelligence is, indeed, developed in our epoch. We have reached a climax in this. But one who has developed intelligence today and who shall neglect the succeeding possibilities of evolution, will destroy himself by his own intelligence. This will then be like an inner fire consuming him, devouring him, making him so small and feeble that he will become stupid and be able to achieve nothing^—a fire that will annihilate him in the epoch wherein the moral impulses will have reached their climax. Whereas a person can be very dangerous today by means of his immoral shrewdness, he will then be without power to harm. In place of this power, however, the soul will then possess in ever increasing measure moral powers—indeed, moral powers such as a person of the present cannot in the least conceive. The highest power and morality are needed to receive the Christ Impulse into ourselves so that it becomes power and life in us.

Thus we see that spiritual-science has the mission of planting in the present stage of the evolution of humanity the seeds for its future evolution. Of course, we must consider in connection with spiritual-science also that which must be considered in connection with the account of the whole creation of the world: that is, that errors may occur. But even one who cannot as yet enter into the higher worlds can make adequate tests and see whether here and there the truth is proclaimed: here the details must be mutually consistent. Test what is proclaimed, all the individual data which are brought together regarding the evolution of the human being, the single phases in the appearing of the Christ, and the like, and you will see that things mutually confirm one another. This is the evidence of truth which is available even to the person who does not yet see into the higher worlds. One can be quite assured: for those who are willing to test things, the doctrine of the Christ reappearing in the spirit will alone prove to be true.

• 1. See also—Rudolf Steiner: Macrocosm and Microcosm